Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss, Abdulrazaq Salihu

Abdulrazaq Salihu’s Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss is a haunting and heart-aching collection of poems exploring the brutal ache of loss and grief. The horrors of violence result in the passing of the speaker’s father and the family must now deal with the aftermath and the mourning that comes with it, but how does one grieve? How does one get through the ache of losing someone so dear to them? Collecting science, Greek mythology, and gut-wrenching imagery of the silence that grief brings, Salihu lays startlingly bare the sorrow, regret, and anger that spills out of such loss. Yet, interwoven within these poems is the heartbreaking beauty of remembering—of honoring the lives of loved ones, of keeping their memories alive, because to grieve is to have loved deeply and thoroughly.

“Abdulrazaq’s Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss is an invitation to a deeply personal voyage of grappling with the realities of loss through poems whose rawness is as corporeal as ‘our dead hearts in our hands.’ His radiant ingenuity shines through every poem–each word, each line, delicately weighed and whetted to pierce through the soul of its audience. The speakers here invite us to see their world for and beyond what seems like a cornucopia of death, grief, oppression, and unspeakable violence, to see the glints of joy and hope when they confess that they ‘can already smell the sprouting of life’ even as they mourn a life now fossilized in their memory. Abdularazaq is a poet sprouting with life as are the poems he has gifted us here.”
—Abu Bakr Sadiq, author of Leaked Footages

“This book is filled with poems that reach within the reader, and from those innermost spaces, spill their familiarity, their relatability on the pages. Abdulrazaq writes at the same time like a timeless sage and a new-age superstar.”
—Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim, Winner, American Literary Review Award

“Abdulrazaq strikes a balance in harmonizing what love, loss, dreams, and realities would look like in different dimensions of the quantum realm. The blend of religion and science offers a stark reality where every possibility exist at once. This collection of poems offers a near perfect attempt at what raw emotions actually look like in concise writing, adding to the popular belief that Abdulrazaq is the messiah this generation of poets desperately need.”
—Fatima Salihu, Author of Sketches