Hello, friends. I’m Samiya Bashir. I’m deeply honored and genuinely excited to join you as guest host of The Slowdown.

What I love about The Slowdown is its insistence on pause. Together we will get to take a few moments together for a deliberate, breathing-with kind of attention to language, to feeling, and to the lived textures of our days. In lives so often driven by machines, poetry offers us a technology of attention; a way to stay awake inside complexity without hardening.

Over two weeks, I’ll be sharing poems that have shaped me, poems that have steadied me, unsettled me, and cracked things open when cracking felt necessary. Some are fierce. Some are tender. All are companions.

I hope these episodes offer you a place to rest your shoulders, sharpen your listening, and remember that language still knows how to hold us; that we, in fact, still know how to hold each other. I’m so glad you’re here.