Jaia Hamid Bashir ’20 Publishes Debut Chapbook ‘Desire/Halves’

By
Andrew Scott
October 28, 2024

Writing alum Jaia Hamid Bashir ’20 has published her debut chapbook Desire/Halves with Nine Syllables Press. 

Nine Syllables is a new press from the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. Bashir’s work was chosen from over 300 entries as the inaugural winner of their Chapbook Contest, which celebrates trans/LGBTQIA++ and BIPOC poets.  

Desire/Halves is a poetry collection in English, Urdu, and Spanish, exploring the Pakistani-American experience alongside themes of connection and incompleteness, with tapestries spanning subjects as varied as animals and fruit.

The juxtaposition of such diverse elements and influences is core to Bashir’s practice. “A central theme in Desire/Halves is language as an identity within itself, as an inheritance and a way of intimacy,” said Bashir. “I grew up speaking in variations of fluency and listening to Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Farsi, Arabic, and Spanish. My first word was “Allah,” and I recited the entirety of The Quran in Arabic by age four.”

It’s an upbringing that Bashir is quick to acknowledge in the development of her craft. “Being raised by immigrant artists, writing became a method of excavation from an early point in my life,” she said. “For me, poetry is a choreography where you dance with what is real, where the real is flexible and mutable.

“I approached the work with tenderness for the more-than-human world with feelings of tremendous alienation and loneliness,” revealed Bashir. “My poems are in community with each other because they were my attempt at making a community.” 

Bashir was drawn to submit to the contest by two female poets. “I was interested in connecting with the spirit and legacy…of Sylvia Plath, arguably Smith College’s most famous alumna,” she said. “Like many young women, Sylvia Plath was one of my first entries into poetry. It was a mystical experience.”

The second was Leila Chatti, the competition’s judge and a poet Bashir has long admired. “Her collection, Deluge, is a work that helped me shape the kind of poet I imagine myself to be.” The honor of being selected hasn’t worn off, “It is still shocking, and I am incredibly grateful.” 

The chapbook is not Bashir’s first time seeing print. Her work has featured in publications including POETRY Magazine, The Rumpus, and The American Poetry Review, the latter while she was still an MFA student at Columbia.

“I crafted cohesive submission packets, which I edited relentlessly—over a dozen times—before sending them out,” recalled Bashir. “Yet, it’s worth noting that smaller, lesser-known publications rejected the same set of poems. Success in placing poems demands a mixture of luck, audacity, and perseverance.”

Her advice for students ranges from the methodical, “Keep organized folders of all your work, write down submission deadlines, create a writing routine, and prioritize editing,” to the personal, “Take a nap. Take your time. Drink lots of water. Every poet has a reader, and the journey is to find them.”