A review by laura_sackton
Desire / Halves by Jai Hamid Bashir

What a lush chapbook. It is full of mouths and animals and journeys: across space, through language, and mostly in and out of bodies and what it’s like living inside one. The poems are dense with color, fruit, places, desire. Many of them are infused with a sense of movement and endlessness: the speaker searching for meaning and respite, a place to rest, a way to untangle the threads of living between and among geographies, between and among languages. Roadkill appears several times, as do various religious texts. All of these references give the poems a wonderful heft and density. They feel deeply rooted in the now but they also feel cosmic—a longing and a yearning flung outward from the self, toward the stars. 

I love the way Bashir considers the relationships between the body, speaking, loving, language, and violence. In one poem she writes: “How much / is about the displaced heart? Nothing / speaks without a body.” In another: “The beloved is a sharpness. / The beloved has an arc.” She always returns to mechanics—hands, mouths, tongues, thighs, how we use them—and then she twists these bodily images into stunning, surprising newnesses, like this: “For in grieving, / the mouth is the first part / of the body to die.” 

A few more lines that wowed me: 

“What I want most / is to have multiple limbs. A litany / of different hearts. How much / can I hold?” 

“Metaphor’s raw flesh is shaped / into something unlike any animal. Always, I am / startled by beauty’s lawlessness.” 

I loved this chapbook. Thanks to Nine Syllables Press for sending!