What do you think?
Rate this book
Where the Apple Falls
Poetry. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. WHERE THE APPLE FALLS resides at the intersections between woman and female—both human and environmental—and the concepts to which she is often death, rebirth, victim, sexual/perverse. Seasons are from the birth of Spring through Autumn's final harvest, the work suggests a recasting of the farmer; a reclamation of both the fall and redemption/death/(re)birth on her own terms. Finally, WHERE THE APPLE FALLS highlights the resilience of strength. Even strength denied does not die. Instead, it continues to grow in power, waiting for its calling. WHERE THE APPLE FALLS reminds us to imagine, encourages us to answer the call, to revel in the beauty and possibility that we all embody, to consider our direction and route.
"In her debut collection WHERE THE APPLE FALLS, Samiya Bashir demands we listen and hear the symphony of stories that 'sail on the ochre cushion of these moonlit poems.' In 'Moon Cycling,' she 'Don't come by my door/ Smellin' fresh like that/ Sizzling like summer/ Steak medium rare/ I'll think you are/ My supper.' But she opens the door and her words and images grab us and never let go. She challenges ideas of edginess, religion, beauty, sexuality and imagination. Bashir's language is vivid and compelling in lines like 'Crooked back bowed into the new black moon.' There's remarkable womanness, vulnerability, pain and insight in these lines…WHERE THE APPLE FALLS can at times be a difficult read, as many poems are dense and complex. But here is a new and provocative voice comfortable in the skin of her poems, secure in her poetic vision." — Black Issues Book Review
"Bashir's first book of poems is a moving blend of personal narrative and lyric grace. Poems that deal with the legacy of slavery are haunting, such as the intimacy and danger in 'Floating Down the Delaware': 'Black skin rots cerulean blue. The/ two bodies were found on Thursday/ night. No wonder I can't keep track/ of time.' Bashir's finely crafted lines touch on migration, faith, urban life and the lives of women, never letting their reach slacken." — Curve Magazine
"[E]xpand[s] the range of questions American poetry can and should ask. Bashir zooms in on exquisite details—from childhood rituals to her lover's lips—then her topics explode outward as she grapples with war, violence against women, and the legacy of slavery. A tendency to make lists sometimes dilutes Bashir's voice, but overall, her writing is precise with rage, intelligence, and tenderness shimmering through." — Girlfriends Magazine
"In her debut collection WHERE THE APPLE FALLS, Samiya Bashir demands we listen and hear the symphony of stories that 'sail on the ochre cushion of these moonlit poems.' In 'Moon Cycling,' she 'Don't come by my door/ Smellin' fresh like that/ Sizzling like summer/ Steak medium rare/ I'll think you are/ My supper.' But she opens the door and her words and images grab us and never let go. She challenges ideas of edginess, religion, beauty, sexuality and imagination. Bashir's language is vivid and compelling in lines like 'Crooked back bowed into the new black moon.' There's remarkable womanness, vulnerability, pain and insight in these lines…WHERE THE APPLE FALLS can at times be a difficult read, as many poems are dense and complex. But here is a new and provocative voice comfortable in the skin of her poems, secure in her poetic vision." — Black Issues Book Review
"Bashir's first book of poems is a moving blend of personal narrative and lyric grace. Poems that deal with the legacy of slavery are haunting, such as the intimacy and danger in 'Floating Down the Delaware': 'Black skin rots cerulean blue. The/ two bodies were found on Thursday/ night. No wonder I can't keep track/ of time.' Bashir's finely crafted lines touch on migration, faith, urban life and the lives of women, never letting their reach slacken." — Curve Magazine
"[E]xpand[s] the range of questions American poetry can and should ask. Bashir zooms in on exquisite details—from childhood rituals to her lover's lips—then her topics explode outward as she grapples with war, violence against women, and the legacy of slavery. A tendency to make lists sometimes dilutes Bashir's voice, but overall, her writing is precise with rage, intelligence, and tenderness shimmering through." — Girlfriends Magazine
77 pages, Paperback
First published June 11, 2005
70 people want to read
About the author
Samiya Bashir
13 books86 followersReach out to connect!
Samiya Bashir is represented by Blue Flower Arts.
blueflowerarts.com || anya@blueflowerarts.com || 619-944-9247
Sometimes Samiya Bashir makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d.
Bashir’s most recent book of poetry, Field Theories, wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies in poems that span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints.
“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. dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” wrote Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic.
Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” Field Theories asks what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world in poems which “creat[ing] cognitive openings,” wrote Durand, “for understanding how science, history, life and poetry intersect.”
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.
Norse gods, Ghanaian call and response, and black gospel all contribute to an exploration of the sensual world in Gospel, her second collection which, along with Where the Apple Falls was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Blackademics reviewer Alexis Pauline Gumbs described the collection as a “close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence.” Bashir is also editor of Best Black Women’s Erotica II, and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In October 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence to sustain and enhance her creative process. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.
She has collaborated with a number of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Bashir has collaborated on a number of multimedia poetry and art projects including M A P S :: a cartography in progress, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, both of which travel the country in exhibition and performance. Bashir has most recently collaborated with Saar and Schlapp on Hades D.W.P., a forthcoming limited edition artists’ book.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Samiya Bashir is represented by Blue Flower Arts.
blueflowerarts.com || anya@blueflowerarts.com || 619-944-9247
Sometimes Samiya Bashir makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Her work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d.
Bashir’s most recent book of poetry, Field Theories, wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies in poems that span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints.
“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. dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” wrote Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic.
Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” Field Theories asks what is the blue of how we treat each other, ourselves, of what this world does to us, of what we do to this shared world in poems which “creat[ing] cognitive openings,” wrote Durand, “for understanding how science, history, life and poetry intersect.”
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.
Norse gods, Ghanaian call and response, and black gospel all contribute to an exploration of the sensual world in Gospel, her second collection which, along with Where the Apple Falls was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Blackademics reviewer Alexis Pauline Gumbs described the collection as a “close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence.” Bashir is also editor of Best Black Women’s Erotica II, and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In October 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence to sustain and enhance her creative process. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.
She has collaborated with a number of visual and media artists on projects such as M A P S :: a cartography in progress, with Roland Dahwen Wu, Coronagraphy with Tracy Schlapp, and Bashir has collaborated on a number of multimedia poetry and art projects including M A P S :: a cartography in progress, and Silt, Soot, and Smut, with Alison Saar, both of which travel the country in exhibition and performance. Bashir has most recently collaborated with Saar and Schlapp on Hades D.W.P., a forthcoming limited edition artists’ book.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 4, 2008
I enjoyed this book thoroughly, and admire Samiya Bashir's exploration of experience - all kinds of experience - through language and through form. No essentialism here! I have taught this book to two beginning poetry classes with great success, and believe it inspired my students to be bold writers and empathetic readers.
April 6, 2008
for sure some of the most moving poetry i've read. heard samiya read at the WAM! conference a few years ago and was overwhelmed with how beautiful her work is. i most highly recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews