Cafe Libro: featuring Samiya Bashir March 20, 2009

Samiya Bashir will be the featured reader for Cafe Libro, a monthly poetry event at Austin's famed Resistencia Bookstore. Come and hear her read from her new book, Gospel: poems.

Advance Praise for Gospel: poems by Samiya Bashir:

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 Dazler

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

Official Website: http://www.resistenciabooks.com/index.html