Ahead of the release of his e-chapbook, Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss, Abdulrazaq Salihu spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern, Marian Kohng, about his work. Salihu discussed the connection between physical science and spiritual loss, how grief isolates yet undeniably connects one to everything outside of themself, and the importance of empty space to his work, whether in music or poetry.

Marian Kohng: What did you wish to convey when connecting the various theories of the universe with human emotions?

Abdulrazaq Salihu: I wanted to insist that grief is not small, not private, and not confined to the body that holds it. The language of physics, quantum entanglement, dark matter, and parallel universes gave me a vocabulary large enough to hold the magnitude of loss I was carrying. When someone dies, especially violently, the rupture feels cosmic. It rearranges gravity. It bends time. It changes how light enters the room. By aligning human emotion with theories of the universe, I was trying to say: what happens inside us is as real and consequential as what happens in the stars. Science and grief are both attempts to explain absence. Both ask: what remains when what we love disappears? In that sense, mourning is a form of physics because we are constantly measuring distances between who we were and who we have become after loss.

MK: Can you speak about the titles of your poems and the significance of them being the first thing readers see?

AS: Titles are thresholds. They are the first consent a reader gives a poem. I take them seriously because I want the reader to arrive already unsettled, already thinking, already leaning forward. Many of my titles function almost like philosophical propositions or prayer lines: “At the Laboratory, I Gave a Stranger My Faith” and “He Understood Qada’a Wal Qadr.” They ask the reader to slow down, to breathe differently, to accept that logic and belief, science and spirituality, will coexist without apology. The titles do not explain the poems; they prepare the nervous system for what is coming. In a book about loss, titles are also acts of care. They tell the reader: this grief has language, structure, and intention. You are not walking into chaos; you are walking into a carefully held silence and I think because titles are really the first thing the readers see, it’s the first determinant of impression, so if I can win with a title, I have won with the entire work.

MK: What is the role of music and silence and the juxtaposition between them?

AS: Music and silence are siblings in my work. Music is what we reach for when language fails; silence is what remains when even music collapses. In poems like “All the Things I Love, the Sands Have Covered with Memory,” music becomes a kind of inheritance. Voices of fathers, radios, communal songs. In Silence is a Ghost, silence becomes presence, something that follows you, occupies rooms, presses against the body. Music for me goes beyond songs, every syllable, punctuation, space, pause and rhythm constitutes what I regard as music, because it flickers the rhythm of the heart. I am interested in the moment when music stops and you are left alone with what you feel. In grief, silence is never empty. It is crowded with memory, regret, prayer, unfinished conversations. I use music to soften the entry into loss, and silence to show its aftermath.

MK: Can you speak about the intention behind the blanks and brackets in your poems?

AS: The blanks and brackets are where language admits defeat. They mark what cannot be safely spoken, what is culturally unsayable, what is too violent, too intimate, or too sacred to be named directly. In “Phantasmagoria with my Country Women as Stardust and Night Song,” the interruptions are not aesthetic tricks, they are ethical pauses. They give the reader space to breathe, to fill in meaning with their own grief, their own memory. Loss fractures speech. These gaps are faithful to that fracture. Sometimes, the most honest line in a poem is the one that refuses to exist.

MK: What part does a sense of belonging play in grief and healing?

AS: Belonging is really both wound and medicine. To belong deeply to a language, a family, a town like Sarkin Pawa means that loss does not happen alone. It reverberates. It’s really Ubuntu, that I am because you are, because we are. When someone dies, the community feels it in their bones, in their rituals, in their silences. Healing, for me, is not forgetting; it is remembering together. Language becomes a home when physical places are no longer safe. Family becomes a shelter even when it is fragile. Grief isolates, but belonging insists you do not carry this alone and that’s what belonging does. 

MK: Can you speak about the Greek mythology in “Thanatos Learns to Love Family Loosely”?

AS: Greek mythology allowed me to externalize grief, to give death a body, a personality, a seat at the table. Thanatos is not just death; he is death learning tenderness, restraint, love. By bringing gods like Hypnos, Nyx, Erebus into a domestic space, I was collapsing the distance between myth and everyday mourning. The first Greek character I learnt about was Medusa, from my sister, it was empathetic and fascinating what her story did to me, I felt she deserved so much better than the cruel world offered her so I read more myths and that was the start. It was my way of asking: what if death is not only cruel, but confused? What if even death has to learn how to leave gently?

MK: What message were you delivering by focusing on the human body in “At the Laboratory, I Gave a Stranger My Faith…”?

AS: The body is where belief becomes real. In that poem, the laboratory is not just scientific, it is spiritual. I wanted to explore what happens when faith is placed in another person’s hands, when destiny (Qada’a wal Qadr) is examined under fluorescent lights. The poem insists that science does not negate belief; it sharpens it. The body becomes a site of trust, vulnerability, and surrender. To offer your body or your faith is to accept uncertainty. That acceptance is not weakness; it is devotion, it’s a sacred promise. 

MK: How did you decide the tone of the last poem compared to the first?

AS: The first poem is communal, outward-facing, almost declarative. It introduces empathy as an act of survival. The last poem is quieter, heavier, more reflective. It understands that empathy does not save everyone, but it saves something; memory, dignity, witness. The book begins by reaching outward and ends by sitting still. That arc mirrors grief itself. You start by screaming; you end by listening.

MK: Can you speak about the mirroring of nature with emotions of loss?

AS: Nature does not mourn politely. It floods and withers. By personifying nature, I was refusing to sanitize grief. The earth reacts the way bodies do. Rivers carry absence. Night expands. Light hesitates. Loss is ecological, it disrupts systems. When a father dies, the weather changes inside a home. Nature becomes a language that does not lie and I’m a witness to all of this grief and climate change in moods.

MK: What does quantum entanglement mean in terms of grief and acceptance?

AS: Quantum entanglement suggests that once two particles are connected, distance no longer matters. That idea saved me. It allowed me to believe that death does not sever relationship, it rearranges it. In grief, acceptance does not mean letting go. It means learning a new physics of love. The dead are not gone; they are elsewhere, still influencing us, still shaping our movements. We remain entangled. Acceptance, then, is not closure. It is continuity without certainty. It is learning how to live knowing that love does not end, it only changes form.

Download your copy for free on the Sundress website!

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Abdulrazaq Salihu is a Nigerian poet and member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest, BPKW Poetry Contest, Poetry Archive Poetry Contest, Masks Literary Magazine Poetry Award, Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors (Poetry), Hilltop Creative Writing Award, and others.

He has received fellowships and residencies from Imodeye Writers Enclave Writers Residency, SPRINg and elsewhere. His poetry is published/forthcoming in Uncanny, Bacopa, Consequence, South Florida poetry, Eunoia review, strange horizons, Unstamatic, Bracken, Poetry Quarter(ly), Rogue, B*k, Jupiter review, black moon magazine, Angime, Grub Street mag and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu, and his Instagram is @Abdulrazaq._salihu. He is the author of Constellations (polar sphere, 2022) and hiccups (polar sphere, 2022). 

Marian Kohng (she/her/hers) is a proud Korean American and an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications and a Traffic Copy Editor at a local news station in Tucson, AZ. She also has a Bachelor’s in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and a Master’s in Marketing. She loves to get lost in a good book and will read just about anything, including the back of the shampoo bottle.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Bleah Patterson. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, February 22nd, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.

Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission. 

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Love Hurts: Writing the Break-up Poem,” a workshop led by Amie Whittemore  on Wednesday, February 11th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: SAFTA).

While poetry has a reputation for expressing adoration, it’s also wonderful for expelling the bad energy broken love leaves behind. In this generative class, we’ll look at examples of breakup poems that demonstrate that breakups are as multifaceted as relationships: the sad breakup poem, the angry breakup poem, the regretful breakup poem. Through these poems, we can come to better understand our roles in these relationships that have ended and begin to find peace. After looking at some example poems, there will be time for writers to generate their own breakup poem(s), with individual lines shared in the chat, as time allows.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Amie Whittemore Venmo: @Amie-Whittemore

This event is brought to you by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that changes everything for you, that throws open the door of possibility, breaks off the hinges, and demolishes the doorframe altogether, leaving a gaping hole in the Wall of What You Thought Was Possible. To my list, I definitively can now add Emilio Carrero’s Autobiography of the [Undead] (Calamari Press, 2025).

The project of the book starts out simply. He writes,

What ensues is a book that is part poetry, epistolary memoir, collage, and philosophical treatise.

One noticeable aspect of the book is the quick proliferation of citations. The main text of Autobiography is about 120 pages long; flipping to the back of the book, you’ll find an additional 30 pages of citations. They range from the Iliad to Pornhub, Donald Trump to Justin Torres. Carrero also cites old work of his own, personal letters, conversations with others, and conversations with himself. All told, the number adds up to just over 700 citations. On page 40, we get a thrilling passage that provides an answer as to why Carrero employs this strategy.

The abstract passage, taken from a text by French linguist/philosopher Jacques Derrida, includes Carrero’s own words liberally inserted within via brackets, a technique that is used throughout the entire book. Here he addresses assumptions about autobiography and rejects them, specifically the need of an author to “[…bury (or cite) themselves, to say what they mean]…But the sign[ifier] [undead] possesses the characteristic of being readable [wanting more than autobiography’s^inc. burial plot^©]” (Carrero, 40). This is, essentially, the animating emotion behind Autobiography. To write about the past is to cite your own history, but a citation implies a settled origin. Something finished. Done. Dead, even. But what if the past cannot be moved on from? Can it really ever be? What if it is unresolved, and its implications and sensations linger? This is what Carrero calls the [undead]—those moments, or people, or memories, that haunt you. Even if they are in the past, they have not passed on, much like a ghost with unfinished business.

Carrero continually refers to the book as a “graveyard,” a place where spirits wander about and epitaphs still ring true. He rejects traditional autobiography as a “burial plot”—a conceit that assumes authority over and a rigid definition of the past, identity, trauma, and language. Carrero’s project is something far more dynamic, an attempt to both disentangle those terms and more fully experience the richness of their inextricability. By composing whole sections of his book from citations—but uprooting them entirely from their original context, and filling them with words of his own—he is subverting the practice of citation and its supposed stability. His work becomes a mosaic of sources and origins that, in the end, is something all his own. Which sounds a lot like selfhood, doesn’t it?

My favorite portions of the book are the ones that, at first, appear more straightforward, simply Carrero’s prose. But he breaks these open too, offering multiple ways of reading and endless combinations of interpretation. Whole paragraphs are struck through, though embedded within these are sentences that are not. For example:

“Years later, I would realized that I was [and always have been] unrecognizable to [you] too. With a belt in [your] hand, [you] had asked me: ‘Quieres otro?’ Do you want another one? Another beating? [Maybe this memory is wrong, misleading, always incomplete.] Maybe [you] had thought I was [your] son, my uncle, who [you] used to beat mercilessly into the carpet floor.” (Carrero, 35)

Upon reading, I asked myself: Why does Carrero cross out his own interpretation of events? Why does he leave the evidence of their consideration? In keeping with the theme of the [undead], it’s clear how he draws attention to the ways that the past, and our emotional entanglements with it, cannot be erased. Or, if they can, the ways that they persist, or change. What does remain unchanged is the trauma itself. I haven’t read a better representation of memory.

Carrero turns other sections that would be prosaic into verse. There are letters that are actually redacted, and we are left with only snippets of text coming through. Take this moment:

The simplicity of this sentence, couched in a stupefyingly complex work of erasure, is intoxicating to me. I can see that town in my mind, smell its oak trees. It comes towards the end of the book, where Carrero is moving towards hard earned peace. Throughout Autobiography, he is continually working through the way colonialism has impacted identity and desire on a personal level. With the help of Wittgenstein, he demands “an accounting with [and beyond] all three [four] cultures [that I / come from]—[W]hite, Mexican, Indian [Black, Taino, Hispanic]” (Carrero, 84). He rejects one label after another, rejecting legibility all together, evoking the Foucauldian axiom that the ability to truly know someone requires an exertion of control over them, is its own type of violence. The radical idea Carrero’s work seems to suggest is: what if even attempting to know the self, to make yourself legible, is a form of self-harm? He writes, “I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face[lessness],” (Carrero, 84). Maybe it is, at least with existing labels and genres, fraught as they are with hierarchy.

This extends even to artistic expression. Carrero confesses later on, “[as I] was actually paid for my labor, I found myself / shying away from the thing I had been working [so hard] toward” (Carrero, 119). By all accounts, it appears that Autobiography of the [Undead] is this thing, or at least, an honest, heartrending, and dazzling attempt. Which is to say, it was a labor of love. But not a love that seeks to protect, or domineer, or even know: this is the kind of love that accepts the unbridled, the unresolved, and lets the [undead] speak.

Autobiography of the [Undead] is available from Calamari Press

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Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge magazine, Emerson Green Mag, and won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.