The book is a literary project with extra-literary objectives and implications. The texts combine various original writing styles to provoke the reader’s creative imagination and make auratic social space attainable. For realizing its main goal, through its creative aesthetics, the book debases normalized forms of social violence, exclusionism, and tribalism. It is meant to be universally relatable by an average reader regardless of her perceived and proclaimed identities. In a way, it is an embodiment of postnihilism, which is a philosophical theory that emphasizes the significance of negativity in the face of unspoken social rules of exclusionism. Postnihilism has been theorized in Revolutionary Hope After Nihilism (Bloomsbury 2022). “Auratic space” is a concept advanced in Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura(SUNY Press 2019) and The Death of Home (De Gruyter 2024).

S. Bahozde’s (Saladdin Ahmed) Elsewhereness antipoetry actualizes its stated marching orders via forceful dialectical serial logic and keen humor (hilarity, really). This book is an “act of attacking the unimaginability of a better world. The Bikonian-Fanonian bursts of anti-poetics, their counter-measures break past the givens to model how such—proper name, place, political calculus—engender and resist, repel and authorize cunning sequences of anti-capitalist trespass. An (anti-) poetics that playfully negates its aesthetic medium of refusal and choice, all the while setting its sights on its key mark: encroaching nihilism in the face of brutal displacement. S. Bahozde’s work dismantles claims in favor of negations, clearing forth space for open-ended, future liberatory claims. Its poetry as propositional logic’s meditations on completion, works, and absence is shudderingly smart. This is poetry as food fueling revolutionary exilic work.”
— Jeremy Matthew Glick, Professor African Diasporic Literature and Modern Drama. Hunter College, English Department, City University of New York, author of The Black Radical Tragic

A voice speaks here which is at once profoundly Kurdish and cosmopolitan. While tracing the melancholy of the spaces of exile, its loneliness and longing, Bahozde takes the reader into spaces where the disillusionment with history does not lead to nihilism. Here the brevity of aphorism tackles the tangled metaphysics of absence and existence. Here is a foreignness that take us away from “pickled banalities” and disturbs our complacent belonging to places, nations, and histories
— Rohit Dalvi, professor of philosophy, Brock University, author of Deleuze and Guattari Explained

This is a passionate and bold set of works that range over topics and concerns widely with an almost febrile intensity. Bahozde’s poetic negations of “normalcy” gain their strength both from rich philosophical insights and from a searching, provocative imagination. Even when set in moments of apparent languor, they have an evident, restless energy.
— Gaurav Majumdar, Whitman College; author, Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900-1940