Boiled Owls

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.

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.

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.