Gospel
by Samiya Bashir
Gospel is an ecumenical resistance song in four parts. In this passionate follow-up to 2005’s Lambda Literary Award finalist, Where the Apple Falls, Bashir’s poems challenge truth to stare down the power of fear and paralysis. ”We intended gospel to strike a happy medium for the down-trodden,” said gospel music pioneer Thomas Dorsey. “This music lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke, and gave them some kind of hope anyway. Make it anything but good news, it ceases to be gospel.” The good news, according to Bashir, is that we are neither alone in our mess, nor alone in our grasp of the tools to heal. In this pull-no-punches collection Bashir lays down a road map, a portable flashlight, and a shaky-legged escort to usher the way toward recovered sight and strength.
Interview on Mandrake Society Radio, March 2009: http://www.mandrakesocietyradio.com/2009/03/30/podcast-poet-samiya-bashir-speaks-gospel/
Interview on Sippin on Ink: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Sippin-on-Ink/2009/04/16/Samiya-Bashir
ISBN-10: 0-9786251-7-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-9786251-7-7
Specs: Softcover,
77 pp.
Price: $15.00
Pub.
Date: March 2009
Cover photo copyright © 2008 by Samiya Bashir
Cover design: E.M. Corbin
Praise for Gospel
“How is it done – / remolding body into / image of body,” writes Samiya Bashir in the poem “Topographic Shifts,” from her latest book, Gospel (RedBone Press, 2009).
The poem describes an amputation performed on a baby girl born with twelve fingers and toes, but these lines make me think, of course, about the pressure so many women feel to alter our bodies: how the “image of [the idealized] body” worries, haunts, maims.
What I love about Bashir’s work is how her poems work against this enforced correcting. Many of her poems thrum with the erotic joy of queer black bodies, and her work celebrates the lived experiences of bodies that resist “remolding.”
—Tamiko Beyer, Kenyon Review, January 2010
Bashir [in Gospel] gathers stories and language from a range of cultural locations and weaves them into … imagistic and sonic qualities…. The Norse gods make a dramatic and cacophonous appearance and, in one of her most effective rhetorical moves, Bashir utilizes a Ghanian call and response sequence that both effectively heightens the drama and energy in the poem and then brings it to rest at its conclusion. The poems of Gospel are rife with layered meanings while they immerse the reader in a landscape that is both familiar and reassuring as well as deeply unfamiliar and strange.
—Julie Enszer, Lambda Book Report, Jan 2010
Set in the mouths of crows, on the edges of couches and dirty tables, and in the hands of the dispossessed, Bashir’s poems [in Gospel] awaken a desire to caress the mundane, hoping your fingers will find divine crumbs of revelation.
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mosaic Magazine,
Summer 2009
… Gospel is, at heart, a collection of poems that suggest we are not alone in this mess of a world. … Many of the poems in this book are alive, sensual, sexual. … The use of the holy water to wet the hair, loosen the curls—this is not the kind of dance King David lost himself in when he had the Ark of the Covenant brought to Jerusalem. No, this speaker says “make me a holy chamber / and I’ll make you whole,” and this is more than just a spiritual union. This is a way of transcending religion. The [title] poem ends with “the word says / we are holy / the stars will agree / that what we are / is holier yet / than the whole / of the world.” This is Bashir’s gospel, her good news, that there is something more holy in joining with each other than in any belief system.
—Brian Spears, therumpus.net, July 2009
Gospel, like all good preaching, is both deftly reflective and full of rafter-rattling truths. In a voice stamped with her definitive, soul-drenched signature, Samiya Bashir blesses us with a roadmap for the living of our fractured and uprooted lives, forcing us to take an unflinching look at faith and the way it’s defined. This is a grandmama-braiding-the-hair book, a rev-ripping-up-the-pulpit book, a book you'll constantly come back to for both beauty and guidance.
—Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler
Luminous and deeply shadowed, at times gravely playful, and always intimate, Gospel sings through—and beyond—ancestral and personal terrains simultaneously mysterious and revealed, to achieve a richness that is both exhilarating and sublime. Here are movements that, through rhythm, language, and light, become exactly what the poet envisions: gospel.
—Thomas Glave, author of The Torturer’s Wife
If a volume of poetry can be a page-turner, Gospel is it. An ambitious storyteller, Samiya Bashir has created a four-part volume that grabs you and won’t let go. Her poetry is urgent and feverish, mournful, sexy and healing. The only thing better than reading Bashir’s words, so luscious and ripe you can taste them, is hearing her perform them.
—Linda Villarosa, author of Passing for Black
Samiya Bashir’s Gospel builds a vibrant, ascending hum of wisdom around us, chronicling the life blood at the root of its making. Her poetic vision is limber and sensual, thriving amidst histories, love lessons and traditions at once singular and collective. To say, as she does, “I am not a fool who believes in things which hurt me,” is to be lyrically aware of what sustains her, from mythic messengers to the ever-present legacy of queer black family: poets and kin all. It is to know that understanding survival is work and joy; one must invent bold images and sly rhythms to shape that play. This is just the kind of poet Samiya Bashir is: attentive, passionate, artful. With each line, her Gospel urges us to seek a like power in ourselves, and share it.
—Tisa Bryant, author of Unexplained Presence
Samiya is as fine a poet as they come
As the title states Gospel is a song
It is beautifully crafted, touching and wonderful to watch it shake
shimmy
and move.
—Pamela Sneed, poet, playwright
