Samiya Bashir      |        FIELD THEORIES      |       Nightboat Books

Samiya Bashir is represented by Blue Flower Arts.

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It’s easy to find poetry in science, from the ring of Latin names to the construction of an elegant theory. It’s a harder thing to find science in poetry. But that is the genesis of Portland poet Samiya Bashir’s book Field Theories, where poems titled after scientific principles like ‘Planck’s Constant’ and ‘Synchronous Rotation’ plumb the space where theories collide with real life: from the back seat of a taxi to jazz clubs, early morning cigarettes, human fables, gun violence and Groucho Marx. -Aaron Scott, Oregon Public Radio

Starting with her title, Field Theories, Samiya Bashir challenges the vocabulary of science, finding inflections and echoes within that vocabulary of the long and brutal history of race and racially based economic exploitation in the U.S.A. When used within the respective sciences of physics, psychology and social science, the term ‘field theory’ (singular) has specific meanings. ‘Unified field theory,’ in particular, coined by Albert Einstein, refers to the attempt to find a single framework behind all that exists (gravity, however, continues to escape this effort). But by changing ‘theory’ to ‘theories,’ (plural) Bashir subverts that idea of a singular framework to reveal the multiplicity of reality: where there is one reality there will be other realities told in various forms, splitting the dominant narrative into a prism of narratives. In contrasts and convergences, she questions history (histories) and how it is (they are) articulated in even the most objective of ‘fields.’ In fact, ‘field’  itself is a loaded word within slavery’s context, indicating enforced agricultural labor. -Marcella Durand, Hyperallergic

At first, it may seem surprising that this energetically in-your-face collection references physics. But when Bashir (Gospel) notes of thermodynamics, ‘When Albert Murray said/ the second law adds up to/ the blues…/ he meant it//… more how my grandmother/ warned that men like women// with soft hands,’ you see where she’s going. ‘Planck’s constant’ denotes holding to others as we climb to get ahead; ‘Ground state,’ a surge toward intimacy; and ‘We call it dark matter because it doesn’t interact with light,’ America’s increasing xenophobia. Thus does Bashir sort out life’s demands, periodically grounding her exploration with references to African American legend John Henry and his wife, Polly Ann.  ­VERDICT Interesting work; anyone who can combine woolly mammoths and the lyric ‘I’m gonna be your number one” in one poem knows her stuff.’ -Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

In this electrifying collection, Bashir co-opts the vernacular of thermodynamics to generate clever, ambitious poems: ‘We call it dark matter because it doesn’t interact with light’; ‘Blackbody curve’; and,  of course, the titular ‘Field Theories.’ Bashir plays with double meanings, unusual narrative structure, and experimental visual arrangements, such as ‘Law of total probability,’ about an office shooting, from which conspicuous circular portions of the text have been removed. In another, ‘Blackbody radiation,’ the text has been scrambled on the page, thrown together with mathematical signs and symbols. The book alternates between these science-inspired, avant-garde pieces and an extended sequence about the legendary John Henry. By pairing this monumental black figure with the terminology of scientific fields that have been defined by whiteness, Bashir creates a jarring, resonant contrast in this substantial gathering. The result is a dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion that reveals poignant observance (‘Even Jesus let / his baker’s dozen fend / for themselves once’) and verges toward hallucination (‘We blow smoke rings and shape them into big beaned cloud gates’). -Diego Báez, Booklist

In her third collection, Bashir (Gospel) displays an intriguingly multivalent approach to the objectivities and subjectivities of black experience reflected in her multimedia collaborations. A series of recurring ‘coronagraphs’ become a tunnel through which the figures of John Henry and his wife Polly Ann speak, forming a sonnet crown that brings new life to an American myth. They are interspersed with four sections structured on the laws of thermodynamics and bearing voices of denizens trapped in a capitalist matrix, ‘An anthropocene/ of wannabe hepcats” who ‘pay// defense department rates/ for a sandwich; unremember// memorable jingles.’ Bashir’s experimental visual gestures, such as a bullet-hole riddled prose poem on the law of probability, resonate as bluesy meditations on cosmic entropy’s presence in the irreversible occurrences of American lives. While fans of Kevin Young will appreciate the pop of unexpected end rhymes and a present-tense narrative impulse, those of the more associative Ashberian school will enjoy such playful titles as ‘Universe as an infant: fatter than expected and kind of lumpy,’ which features a private visit with Groucho Marx. Whether depicting the faces of marginalized citizens at late-night truck stops or cross-sectioning ‘bloodstreaks through musculoskeletal structure,’ Bashir positions the slings and arrows of black American life as both empirically observable and available for radical, and movingly layered, interpretations. -Publishers Weekly

Bashir hits a heightened sense of observation in her writing, born of a need to be vigilant as a woman of color. ‘I’m born and raised in America, so my race, my gender, my class—these things have been enforced as a part of how I move in the world, how the world experiences me and responds to me, since birth. It means that I’ve had to learn so much for simple survival reasons,’ she says. ‘We talk sometimes about how white people don’t necessarily understand us as black people, but the flip side is not true. We have to understand everything about them before we leave elementary school if we want to live. -Bryanna Briley, Portland Monthly

Field Theories pivots around this central theme, that the black body—scientifically speaking—is an idealized physical body that absorbs (my italics) electromagnetic radiation, while a white body reflects (my italics) all rays completely and uniformly in all directions. It’s how Bashir renders that theme which makes this collection worth reading. -Shane Michael Manieri, Lambda

What makes this work particularly remarkable and interesting is the way that, even as the poems demand that you reflect on and identify your own position (one possibly outside the first-person plural position they mark for themselves) they allow a movement-alongside and sustain a relation, one whose terms include an awareness of the multiple kinds of fields the poems work to make perceptible. You just have to stand, as a body, aware of the terms of the fields acting on you, to do so. Overall Bashir’s book is beautiful, thoughtful, graceful, and strange. It is a book that makes the conditions of sense-making, the conditions of life in a system with an inherited racist history, the conditions of formal movement in a poem, available to sense in new ways. -Kirsten Ihns, Chicago Review

— Rachel Mindel reviews Field Theories for Gertrude Press

During the six months leading up to the release of Field Theories, Bashir created six short videopoems in collaboration with video artist Roland Dahwen Wu (Patua Films) and dancer Keyon Gaskin (Physical Education) to remix and reimagine the work through a new medium: sound + image + light.

"There are pecks here, as units of measure for hidden sweetness. And dag! Dag is here, scatted at Detroit depth. Field Theories is flush with blue notes, swung in the exercise and exorcism of blue devils, the off minor, off spherical acoustics of “baby we won” and “not the father” are folded into the gravity of a unified feel, the beauty and violence of inseparable differences, some impossible someone’s arms. Our tongues are in the pitch black mouth she conjures and records. This is our music.”

– FRED MOTEN

“Samiya Bashir’s FIELD THEORIES is science as only poetry can be. She’s done her research and now she rethinks everything she gets her pen on: the relationship of dark matter to the sun, the possibilities of the heroic crown of sonnets, Keatsian aesthetics, social re- and inter-actions, and language itself. These poems are alive, are woman-truth, are burning darkly. Grab your shades. No: fire up your magnetosphere. This book is “black body radiation,” and you can’t handle it - but you’ve got to.” – EVIE SHOCKLEY

“To read Samiya Bashir’s poetry is to be pulled up by a force so intense and magnetic as to constitute a new field of action: dark matter and radiation, witness and redaction, and the pendulum of time and history, swinging, swinging. I am reminded of Melvin Tolson’s description of the night on which that legendary steel-driver John Henry was born: 'an ax of lightning split the sky.' This book splits the sky right open, swinging like a melody, swinging like a boxer, swinging on each elemental and freighted word to beat the devil.” – D.A. Powell

“I’m struck with bedazzlement at Bashir’s raw precision, how she hotwires the auto of our tongue.” – PHILIP METRES

“This roiling, immersive series of poems peaks, peeks at and piques the senses. You can never assume what she’ll do next. This engagement is a reckoning to those who open the pages.

– TRACIE MORRIS

“Samiya Bashir’s poems have a terrific edginess. Reclaim, notice, and repair through the exigencies poetry may present. That’s a theory. Be an alchemist of the quotidian and you will survive. Another theory. Quantum mechanics get ready. It is a trembling vital field this poet is traveling in.” – ANNE WALDMAN

“A lyric scientist at the top of her game, Samiya Bashir explores the emotional and cultural physics of desire, love, loss, family, history, and everyday existence in her new collection Field Theories. These inventive poems move across a range of psychicscapes, recentering black voices and bodies through blackbody theory and quantum mechanics, backyard meditation and bedroom lament. Bashir asks and shows with consummate artistry, what are the deep and hidden laws that divide and connect us?” – JOHN KEENE

"Field Theories masterminds the “neverhush,” and each poem makes a spectacular event of artful speech that dances on the ridgeline of this brilliant poets’ history, heart, and intellect. And while she cuts to the quick, all swift-witted and informed, what I admire most is Bashir’s dexterous language, how she aligns our bodies to a vernacular sense of ourselves, knowing that the world is more than empty signs and algorithms, and that we need to ever engineer the widest possible love the world has ever seen." – MAJOR JACKSON

“These poems resonate as code rising from caverns of the unexpected. When listening to their seeming irregularity one thinks of Dolphy's work where seeming fracture exists as portal to luminosity.” – WILL ALEXANDER

“With a quiet ferocity, Samiya Bashir has composed a book of sharp edges and sly questions pointed at each of us. Field Theories demands the sort of wakefulness that proves we’re still alive.” – TIM SEIBLES