A Conversation with Rebecca Salazar

Have you ever read a book that feels like looking into a mirror—one that reflects the parts of yourself you’ve buried while offering the comfort of a quiet, steady it’s not your fault?   

Rebecca Salazar’s poetry collection antibody does exactly that. These poems make you feel seen. They insist on healing. They illuminate the raw, complicated reality of living with trauma and learning, slowly, to move through it. Above all, they remind you that you are not alone. Released in March of 2025, antibody is a powerful follow-up to Salazar’s 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award–shortlisted poetry collection sulphurtongue. I had the privilege of interviewing Salazar about antibody. As a queer Latinx reader myself, I felt deeply represented by antibody and wanted to help carry its message to others who might need it just as much as I did. 

Antibody was one of TMR’s Best Poetry Books of 2025! See the full list here

Anastassia Matheson: In the poems in your new collection, antibody, you explore and confront trauma, sexual violence, and PTSD without softening those subjects, challenging the notion of the “ideal” victim by exposing the raw, unfiltered realities of survival and grief. The book is dedicated to other survivors, yet I wondered if you were also writing with another audience in mind—those who perpetuate harmful narratives about victimhood. How did your sense of audience shape the way you approached the collection? 

Rebecca Salazar: A lot of these poems started in a more reactive form, putting on paper the things I wished I could safely say to those who perpetrate or enable sexual violence. Many of these were explicitly addressed to a “you” that could be any number of people who have caused harm to me and to others. Over the editing process, I realized I did not want to give that audience so much of the time or respect they deny survivors, and shifted these poems away from that direct address, either addressing someone else, or sometimes an imagined composite of fellow survivors. There are still poems with that reactive desire for rage or vengeance here. I did want to include that ugliness, that desire to respond to being violated with more violence, since it is a desire that is punished even when it never moves to action. But I chose to keep survivors at the center of who I was speaking to.  

AM: In my own experience, as someone who also identifies as Latinx, I try to weave my Colombian heritage into everything I write—it feels less like an influence and more like a presence that’s always there. I’m curious if you feel the same? How does your Latin heritage live within your work? Do you find it shaping the way you see the world, the rhythms of language, the stories you tell? In what ways has it become inseparable from your voice as a poet?  

RS: I am pretty disconnected from most Latinx community, both because of my family’s immigration from a place I never got to live, and because of the lack of that community where I live now. A lot of my first book, sulphurtongue, was written as an attempt to reconnect with my heritage and the things I never learned about it, or lost connections with, and as a way to play with how learning languages and their rhythms shaped the world for me. For antibody, I didn’t expect that part of me would be on the page at all, but I couldn’t write about healing without coming back to the loss of traditional healing knowledge that came with the loss of my grandfather, who was a curandero. I couldn’t write about gendered violence without writing about how inextricable it is from racialized violence. And, in moments when English felt inadequate for what I needed to say, lines in Spanish crept in. I can’t separate that part of myself from my writing.  

AM: In your poem “Exquisite Corpse” you write, “I am terrified I built my poetry on the backs of violent men.” That line struck me deeply, as I’ve always wrestled with the fear that writing mostly about my traumatic experiences makes those experiences the entirety of who I am—that what happened to me defines me. Do you find that you’re able to separate your identity from those experiences when writing about them? If so, how?  

RS: This line is actually borrowed from Lauren Turner’s poem “Stop Bringing Me Here,” from her book The Only Card in a Deck of Knives. “Exquisite Corpse” is a cento, meaning each line is quoted from another author. I originally put this poem together as an exercise in finding the things I could not say in my own words, from fragments borrowed from writers whose own voices I felt resonating in my throat. Including it in the book felt important as a statement of how survivors’ voices never exist in isolation, even against how we are forced away from one another.  

Including it in this book also became an exercise in citational practice: as part of the editing process, I contacted each of the authors of the 31 lines in this poem, requesting permission to quote and reprint their work. There are many rules in copyright law about what constitutes “fair use” in most kinds of writing, but nothing explicitly applies to poetry—with a lot of support from my publisher (thanks especially to Kelly and Aruna!), I decided to ask each author for their consent.  

Many of these writers I had met before and got to reconnect with; others I had never met but long looked up to and got to thank them for their influence; a few I never managed to reach, but still want to acknowledge, and all are cited in the notes for this poem in the book. I do feel that I would not have been able to write the rest of this book without the voices of many other writers and survivors—those quoted in this poem, those quoted in epigraphs, those whose art and resistance kept me going through the writing and beyond it.  

AM: In the third section of the poem “To Bait A Fish Withal,” you write, “I teach you how not to do.” Each stanza begins with “do not,” framing survival as a series of prohibitions meant to prevent sexual violence. As a reader, this evoked the societal pressure on women to regulate themselves in order to avoid harm. Yet by the end of antibody, I felt the deeper lesson was that our trauma is not our fault—a message that seems to stand in contrast with the poem’s framing. Did you intend this tension? And did writing antibody help you articulate or affirm the idea that survival does not mean self-blame?  

RS: This is a tension I wanted to challenge throughout. A lot of the lessons I had internalized about sexual violence before I even had reason to notice them were prohibitions about what I should not do or be or say as a person raised as a girl. The whole gender was taught to me as something that made me always-already to blame for any wrongs—which only reinforced the external and internal victim-blaming I received after experiencing sexual violence.  

To be honest, what put the first cracks into my internalized self-blame was finding out that many women I already admired or loved had been harmed by some of the same men who harmed me. It was a shock for many reasons, but I suddenly found that if I couldn’t blame them for the actions of another, I had to re-examine how I condemn myself for the same. I wanted the poems to reflect multiple phases of that unlearning, too.  

AM: As you lived and wrote, did the book grow and change with you? In my experience, I’ve found that each return to a project reflects a new version of me; each draft or entry acts like a dialogue between who I was and who I am now. Do you find that to be true in your process? Do you see a difference, in the poems or in you, between the first and final drafts?  

RS: There have been so many versions of this manuscript and, likely, of me, during the writing process. At its publication date, this book was already more than ten years in the making. It started as an attempt to write about trauma and ecological damage, then became an attempt to put together pieces of a time when my memory formation was impaired by PTSD, then became a failed dissertation during the first years of the pandemic, then merged with legal research, and dream journals, and grief rituals to become what it is now. I do recognize different versions of myself in these poems, but many of them slip into composite characters or collective voices that are more than me. I think the book needed all of these permutations, or at least, I needed these to create it.  

AM: As you were writing about your experiences in dealing with trauma, violence, and loss, did the act of writing itself shift anything for you? Does it offer healing? Did the book, or any particular poem within it, alleviate the weight?  

RS: I think I wrote in the synopsis for the book that it is an exorcism, and that sometimes feels literal. This book was very much a process of purging this violent thing that took over my life and tending to the things it changed about me. It has been frustrating to spend more than ten years writing about trauma and sexual violence, and I often wish I could write about anything kinder. I had, and still have, so many doubts about sharing this book that hurts to write and read.  It is something I had to write because it eclipsed everything else, and because that experience eclipses everything for so many of us. I can’t say I am anything close to healed, or at least, I no longer believe healing has an end point.  

There’s an essay by Camonghe Felix that deeply influenced my writing, in which she writes about surviving sexual violence as being transformed into a living-dead thing: something that wasn’t meant to survive and is full of the nightmare it endured. Even whatever hope there is in this book feels twisted into whatever monstrous thing it had to become to survive. I wanted to at least make room for what survivors have to become, without sanitizing or suppressing it— transformed, unhealed, undead, unruly, but alive.  

AM: In antibody’s final poem, you write “justice is” and much of the rest is blacked out, leaving only a repetition of “&, &, &.” Reading it, I felt that justice is conveyed as an empty silence, measurable by what it lacks, and that it questions whether survival is resistance or resignation.  Was that an intention you held while writing? If not, what was your purpose in using absence and redaction here?  

RS: The redacted sections of this poem try to make visible the silencing of survivors by legal means like SLAPP suits, and the things that remain true even when they cannot be spoken aloud.  The blacked-out sections are there for the stories that are suppressed when abusers use things like defamation suits to threaten their victims into silence. They are also there for the imperfect protection of whisper networks survivors use to keep one another safe.  

The first draft of this poem did not have anything redacted, and I keep with me the names and words “under” each black box. The final redacted section (“justice is [] & [] & [] &…”) is a space to both hold and protect the names of fellow survivors I’ve known, some of whom are gone, all of whom deserve more space than I can give them. Their names, even if unsaid, still count as more justice than any legal system could grant us.  

This interview was produced in collaboration with the English Department of the University of the Fraser Valley

Anastassia Matheson

Anastassia Matheson is an English literature and creative writing student, currently completing her Bachelors Degree at the University of the Fraser Valley. She currently resides in Surrey, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples; specifically, the q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen), and sǝmyámǝ (Semiahmoo) First Nations.