With frenetic language finely calibrated, sitting somewhere between impulse and philosophy, Boiled Owls resists common and fanciful depictions, instead turning its camera onto the spaces addiction arises from, along with the turmoil it can so often bring. Sharma’s project is not interested in stylising its subject, nor presenting it through the lens of pity. This is a collection of poetry which moves between centre stage and the fringes of addiction, never failing to ignore the nexus between mania and the road to sobriety.

Praise for Boiled Owls

‘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

‘Azad Ashim Sharma is an extraordinary force and presence in the landscape of contemporary British poetry. Boiled Owls is a stunning rendition of  “half imaginary geography,” a presencing of recovery as a way to consider the relational logics of nation-state, embodiment, and political hope. Here is the cadence of survival, and also, of the life that comes after it.’  — Bhanu Kapil

‘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

‘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

About Azad Ashim Sharma

Azad Ashim Sharma is a writer and publisher based in South London. He is the director of the87press. His work includes Against the Frame (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). His work has featured in publications such as the Asian American Writers Workshop, Stand Magazine, Gutter Magazine, the journal Social and Health Sciences, SPAMzine, MIR Online, and Wasafiri. He is a Chase-funded PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award 2023.