Boiled Owls
A collection of poems that demystify drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, and anxiety whilst thinking through their relation to capitalism and its resistance, the family, and a writer’s compulsion to write.
Poetry
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Boiled Owls refers to an old colloquialism: to be as boiled as an owl, to be drunk. Azad Ashim Sharma turns the phrase into a surrealist exquisite corpse in which the body and mind of a drug addict melt into the seams of personhood, spreading out into the wider world and recovering friends, family, love, and humor as strands of support. Troubling the dogma and pop cultural representations of twelve-step program discourse, Sharma emphasizes the mundane and non-linear aspects of recovery, ultimately positing addiction as an internalization of capitalism and recovery as the development of a socialist consciousness.
Praise
Because addiction has been figured as desire transfixed, the name for the motive force itself, of capitalism, for the overthrow of capitalism, addiction therefore accrues the glamour of fully-invested life. Azad Ashim Sharma’s book tells us to the contrary that addiction is the gray, unchanging, extinction of dream, and that thriving needs difference and no elaborate excuses.
-John Wilkinson
As notable as its intense devotion is the upset and surprise of Azad Ashim Sharma’s poetry, all off and under the books in that subversive, songful erudition that resists notation. Ancient talk of numbers aside, maybe poetry is learning how not to count and how not to pay. Just this rough constancy of giving in withholding from word to word, from substance to spirit, from additive and addictive and abductive suffering to lyric wisdom.
-Fred Moten
The poet, Azad Ashim Sharma, is deeply invested in modernity, tradition, and the counter-traditions of tearing it apart. This book likes to interrogate just about everything, mostly a self, trying to sing and heal in late-capital. Boiled Owls is lyrical, essayistic, plaintive, and achieved. As this book tells us “Here, pain is a rich tapestry of historical subjectification.” The world it conjures is phantasmagorical and looks just like this one.
-Peter Gizzi
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Details
ISBN: 9781643622354
Paperback, 72 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Reviews
By turning to language’s most extreme occasion, that of poetry, Sharma brutally carves back into society a blistering critique of its narco-capital.
In the literary world, where writers soundwave the lyrical self, Azad Ashim Sharma stands out. As a poet and thinker influenced by Theodor Adorno’s philosophy, he explores the nuances of writing not just poetry but living within this psychological space, one that resonates with a collective and historical consciousness.
As a poet, Azad Ashim Sharma has written extensively about his alcohol and substance misuse. This is his second collection of poems, which further explores his recovery by grounding it in the interrogation of the capitalist self. If addiction is rooted in capitalism, recovery comes with writing, with family, and with melody. And these poems – lyrical, devoted, resistant – turn capitalism on its head to demystify the recovering self.
Taking approximately six years to write and publish, the poetry book tackles a variety of themes including but aren’t limited to: capitalism against socialism, drug addiction and alcoholism, social media addiction, depression, anxiety, and the slow, nonlinear process of recovery with the support of his loved ones, specifically Sharma’s brother and mother.
[Sharma] offers an expansive exploration of recovery and the societal structures memorializing addiction as a representation of capitalist ideologies. . . readers are offered a glimpse at the resilient nature of the human spirit and the power of literature.
The intimacy of this collection is raw, and its painfulness is potent both in descriptions of active drug addiction and the road toward recovery… Boiled Owls is an all-encompassing collection that captures the nuances of struggling with addiction.
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Translation, Poetry