Spanning decades and relationships, dream worlds and memories and therapy sessions, Jill Khoury’s soaring, elegiac collection earthwork (Switchback Books, 2024) invites readers into the volatile and immersive experience of grieving someone both beloved and dangerous. In Khoury’s case, that person is her mother, to whom this collection is dedicated. Through three sections, the speaker reckons with her childhood, adulthood, and the aftermath of her mother’s death. The collection is grounded in her mental return to this figure, both mythically large and emaciated in her mental and physical illness, still looming over the speaker’s days, nights, and conception of herself.

The collection begins with a prelude entitled night cultivars, in which the speaker as a child immediately demonstrates her lyric and material superpower: that of unceasing observation, dismissed by her mother. The speaker describes how, 

Quickly, the speaker gives the reader a medley of snippets illustrating fraught exchanges with her mother and the instability of their relationship. She remembers her mother in vignettes of mental decay: she flushes her meds, ceases to eat, doesn’t want her daughter to come visit her even as she says: “my mother’s whisper i would never do anything to hurt you / but this like so many of her communiques is a secret wrapped in a half-truth” (Khoury 5). 

Even in the anger sparked from this neglect, the speaker’s care for her mother transforms, but does not cease: in one poem she burns her mother’s old clothes; the next, she remarks on how, 

This angry tenderness and ebbing and flowing despair sucks the reader into the speaker’s complex, fearless voice with abandon.

The speaker, understandably, seeks an escape away from the all-encompassing presence of her mother, and finds it in her dreams. A motif that permeates this collection is the phrase “all aspects of the dream are aspects of the dreamer”; four poems spanning the collection bear this same title. Early on in earthwork, the speaker remembers one such dream about her mother’s mental and physical deterioration in spine-crawlingly visceral detail: “my mother is perched on the couch dying properly wrapped / like a molebeast in a baby blue blanket” (Khoury 18). She is jolted back to the present when “[her] therapist asks [her] what does dying properly mean” Khoury (18). As the daughter of a palliative care physician, I was struck by moments like these that paralleled end-of-life care. The speaker’s therapist, here, asks the foundational question of palliative care: how does one die well? And in exploring someone’s values at the end of their life, the question very quickly becomes, how does one live well? Khoury delves into this query from multiple vantage points in this collection, leaving no lead unturned as she studies her chronic illness, mental health, and survivorship of abuse along with her complicated relationship with her mother.

Through all this pain and mourning, the speaker has moments that elucidate an awareness of their own resilience – the strength needed to continue living with, and in spite of, her trauma. Khoury counters a fight brewing with her mother, who compares her garden to kindling, by asserting,  “i know something about surviving fire” (39). The dream motif continues as the speaker chooses to enter her mother’s bedroom in a dream, reminding herself: “it is important to remember / i choose this in dreams you are the chooser / you have the control” (Khoury 52). Her dreams, like her poetry, like her garden, become her sanctuaries, and in this the speaker illuminates a myriad of sites of refuge from the harm she’s experienced. 

In Part Three, Khoury wrenches the reader from graphic descriptions of the past to an immediately more factual tone in the present. The section’s opening poem begins, “i delivered the eulogy / otherwise she would not have had a eulogy” (47). She continues to describe, with a clear numbness of immediate grief, the barebones of transpired events: her mother’s clothes were “bagged donated / to a rural church” (Khoury 48); she leaves a voicemail matter-of-factly informing her mother that she “tried to end [herself] / with antipsychotics / & alcohol” (Khoury 49). Pivotally, too, in Part Three the speaker meets her past self instead of becoming her in memory. Rather than absorbing the self-loathing and hurt her younger self was forced to endure, the speaker bids her own goodbyes to her mother and, “[takes] the knife from [her] belt to extract / the image of the child who sits in [her] mother’s lap” (Khoury 63).

This book is not just about grief or trauma, but also where this long-lasting pain settles to live within our bodies. Khoury repeatedly reckons with what it means to relive your past with such vividness that it becomes difficult to differentiate where your memories end and the present begins. Like many memories of trauma, they sometimes cease to be memories at all, and become just a different kind of embodied experience re-lived intermittently. As the speaker describes in the present-tense an afternoon lying beside her mother on a beach, she interrupts her speech to chastise and remind herself:

By beginning to create some form of distance between her past and current self, the speaker shows us how she is able to come home to her present body.

The collection’s title, earthwork, betrays one of the speaker’s central coping strategies; noticing and nurturing the earth, a place she understands when nothing else makes sense. After a suicide attempt, she relates the difficulty in returning back to school:

Khoury makes sense of her turbulent world with natural imagery, as she seeks for an escape in her suicidality and encounters a different spiritual response: “i ask god to erase me please / he wants me to macerate these herbs instead / light stratifies into color” (56-57). Nature and gardens, here, become sites of creation to rival the speaker’s instinct towards self-hate and destruction. One of Khoury’s most astounding poetic talents is her ability to turn a violent verb like “macerate” to something reclamatory in the space of just a few lines. Nature rebuilds when it is destroyed, and herbs, macerated, have even more of a capacity to heal in their transformed state. 

In earthwork, Jillian Khoury dives into complex and living trauma, both experienced and inherited. Through it all, she retains tenderness for the mother who both raised her and harmed her, bending over backwards to attempt to understand her in memory as she did in life. This collection’s generous meditations on generational trauma will stay with me long after closing its pale-blue cover; at turns gentle, rageful, and vastly melancholic. Khoury encapsulated this range of the mixed bag we inherit from those who have loved and harmed us as she remembers her mother: “she hands me a box of her favorite earrings / some of these are tarnished” (8).

earthwork is available from Switchback Books

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Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.

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.