Emily Skillings Interviews Asiya Wadud for BOMB

For BOMB, Emily Skillings interviews Asiya Wadud, author of day pulls down the sky / a filament in gold leaf, "a book of poetic responses to the songs of choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, and Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse), a choral book-length poem that focuses its attention towards the 'Left-to-Die' boat, a small rubber vessel on its way from Libya to Italy carrying seventy-two passengers whose cries for help and assistance from various governments were ignored for fourteen days," as Skillings notes in her intro. From their conversation:

ES I want to begin by mentioning that your book has this line in it, a line I think about often because if its beauty and complexity:   

The Fibonacci catacombs of my one neighbor’s sunflower

AW When I was eight years old, we lived on a street of quiet townhouses. This was right outside of Washington, DC. Cater-cornered from our own house was this house with one radiant sunflower in the front yard. I don’t remember very much about the house itself, but the sunflower left an enduring imprint. I loved this sunflower. It had this electricity for me; it was this magnetic force. Sometimes I would sit and watch it. In my memory it was always encased in sunlight. I think it was taller than me. There were no other sunflowers in the front yard, and inside the manicured front lawn, this sunflower appeared to rise out of nothingness. 

When I started reading Clarice Lispector’s work a few years ago, I was reminded of the sunflower and its strangeness. Now, I think of that sunflower often. It had such a stabilizing structure, so calm but certain in its Fibonacci mathematics. I think that sunflower stands in for all sunflowers for me. Every time I see a sunflower, I remember that first one I loved. I don’t remember ever walking across the street to see the sunflower up close. It was always from the distance of my window. 

Read on at BOMB.