The 2023 winner of the Nine Syllables Press chapbook contest is Desire/Halves by Jaia Hamid Bashir.
This debut poetry collection from Jaia Hamid Bashir is a tantalizing study of desire for care and nourishment. Bashir navigates between English, Urdu, and Spanish, examining the interplay of these languages and the experience of being Pakistani-American. Bashir’s melancholy descriptions of rabbits and dogs, along with her visceral fruit imagery, connect the tender, human experience with that of the nonhuman. Alluring, mesmerizing, and evocative—this debut book of poems invites the reader to examine the embodiment of incompleteness.
Leila Chatti describes Desire/Halves as “a lush read of infinite tenderness. I marvel at Bashir’s dexterous use of language and sensuous, striking imagery—the “silverhurry” of moon, “اااااا blades of grass.” I could look forever through Bashir’s eyes if it meant seeing the world like this. A masterful, vivid debut—here is a voice to pay attention to.”
Jaia Hamid Bashir is a South Asian artist whose work has been featured in publications such as POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, The Arkansas International, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and Image Journal. A graduate of the University of Utah and Columbia University, she lives and writes in the American West with her partner.
Desire/Halves has received stunning reviews in Poetry Northwest, The Boston Globe, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and Cleaver Magazine.
“The debut collection by Jai Hamid Bashir, brims with animal energy, the snake, the dog, the oyster, the deer, with the stars keeping wary watch above in the cosmic hum. These are intimate poems, poems of the deep yearn… We have the animals inside us, fierce and tender, needing ferocity, needing tenderness, needing to be fed, and Bashir re-introduces us to them,” writes Nina MacLaughlin in The Boston Globe.
“Hamid Bashir accomplishes such marvels in her use of language that each blade conjured to invoke loss only whets my desires and asks of language,” writes Amogha in Poetry Northwest, “Hamid Bashir leaves me with a litany of all the possibilities her language has opened, and an irrational flicker of hope that perhaps this too is possible. Or this loss is given strength to bloom into something else.”
The 2023 winner of the Nine Syllables Press chapbook contest is Desire/Halves by Jaia Hamid Bashir.
This debut poetry collection from Jaia Hamid Bashir is a tantalizing study of desire for care and nourishment. Bashir navigates between English, Urdu, and Spanish, examining the interplay of these languages and the experience of being Pakistani-American. Bashir’s melancholy descriptions of rabbits and dogs, along with her visceral fruit imagery, connect the tender, human experience with that of the nonhuman. Alluring, mesmerizing, and evocative—this debut book of poems invites the reader to examine the embodiment of incompleteness.
Leila Chatti describes Desire/Halves as “a lush read of infinite tenderness. I marvel at Bashir’s dexterous use of language and sensuous, striking imagery—the “silverhurry” of moon, “اااااا blades of grass.” I could look forever through Bashir’s eyes if it meant seeing the world like this. A masterful, vivid debut—here is a voice to pay attention to.”
Jaia Hamid Bashir is a South Asian artist whose work has been featured in publications such as POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, The Arkansas International, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and Image Journal. A graduate of the University of Utah and Columbia University, she lives and writes in the American West with her partner.
Desire/Halves has received stunning reviews in Poetry Northwest, The Boston Globe, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and Cleaver Magazine.
“The debut collection by Jai Hamid Bashir, brims with animal energy, the snake, the dog, the oyster, the deer, with the stars keeping wary watch above in the cosmic hum. These are intimate poems, poems of the deep yearn… We have the animals inside us, fierce and tender, needing ferocity, needing tenderness, needing to be fed, and Bashir re-introduces us to them,” writes Nina MacLaughlin in The Boston Globe.
“Hamid Bashir accomplishes such marvels in her use of language that each blade conjured to invoke loss only whets my desires and asks of language,” writes Amogha in Poetry Northwest, “Hamid Bashir leaves me with a litany of all the possibilities her language has opened, and an irrational flicker of hope that perhaps this too is possible. Or this loss is given strength to bloom into something else.”
