Samiya Bashir’s powerful residency with THE POETRY CLINIC found her answering a full range of questions and queries with warmth, wit, and deep poetic compassion.

Poetry can liberate the imagination–and be a product of an imagination unhindered. Poetry is also communal, conjuring and singing voices together. In poetry, the world can become motion and play. Language slides into magic and back again into landscape, rocks, rivers, handshakes, and banisters. Into anything really. Its materials are free and everywhere. In poetry we make the world. And it’s in that grounded imagination where attention grows, new kin can be made, old kin re-found. One might very naturally also find solace, succor — or healing.

Living in a vulnerable body is often tough. It can also be a source of wonder and joy. Poetry Clinic provides a poetic response to the complex situation of being a human during this time of climate crisis and cascading conflicts, the ongoing pandemic, and other social and environmental upheavals. Poetry Clinic offers a remedy to cultivate new relationships among readers, poets, and poems in a time of profound uncertainty. It provides an online platform for poets to engage with readers looking for a poetic response to living, including rituals, losses, and wonder. 

In short, Poetry Clinic serves as a portal for users to request poems that address specific life situations they’re facing.