The tenderness of Boiled Owls allows for an exchange of lamentation and suffering (albeit of a different kind) between the poem’s speaker and those he loves. The poems revive memory and depict the process of overcoming addiction’s grip: “I needed to justify my experience without someone else’s voice, but as I said, I’ve got no image to return to ’cause so much depended on drugs …” The first poem in this collection sets the scene with a raw rendering of Sharma’s awareness while in active addiction; it’s an elegy for a past life, where he was “surrounded by my own sick,” and this sickness was an all-encompassing kind, an emotional jackhammer twisting itself into his relationship with himself and others. The entirety of this work is laden with softness; it’s a love-sick ballad. “I drank again last night” reads like an admission of a broken promise.
Sharma’s frailty is threaded through the narrative of this text; “I want to worry about how much I will consume … these are the real problems of subsistence,” he writes. This line has such an openness to it; he wants to worry about keeping himself healthy and alive, and that’s what this volume begs for: aliveness, continuation, and an ongoingness free from the restraint of addiction. The pace and placement of this piece also help move the narrative of emotions along: “This is the most authentic essay about a great downturn in my suburban life.” In a community that boasts idyllic lifestyles, Sharma opens a portal into a darker truth, never shying away from painful narratives and the misery of past experiences.
Boiled Owls offers a corporeal freshness that is enchanting and evocative: “I wake up naked on the patio covered in rain.” After a night of partying, there’s also an ultimate cleansing from a rain shower. The body of the poet is exposed, and the imagery exposes him. The language is honest, and this piece’s vocality seeks truth. But with honesty comes the looming potentiality of a relapse, and that awareness is vital to recovery. “I’ll do it all again,” Sharma writes. This collection is filled with authentic quips, and its authenticity propels its mournfulness because there’s an understanding that relapsing is wrong and that it’ll happen again anyway. The simplicity of the lines in this piece produces a jarring after-effect; the language is, at times, unembellished. It’s not trying to be anything but honest.
In a later poem, “Venlafaxine,” Sharma continues along a tender stream of consciousness, where he seeks a way out of his addiction by finding “new experiences of high definition paintings or a lucid, happy memory.” He shares this over a conversation, exchanging dialogue over “my eighth cup of coffee, explaining how an addict doesn’t know how to love because I don’t know how to forgive myself and stop carrying this—” This poem feels like a climax, where the speaker transcends self-awareness and begs his body to release him from the cycle of the punishment that is drug abuse. It also exposes us to some of the more intimate areas of Sharma’s life through lilts of a conversation. We see the raw decadence of pleading with himself and the world, supplementing drugs and addiction with pulses of beaming beauty. Sharma doesn’t quite yet know how to forgive himself, but this is him trying.
The intimacy of this collection is raw, and its painfulness is potent both in descriptions of active drug addiction and the road toward recovery. Sharma takes us to the space beyond addiction—to the bumping routine of normalcy. His voice grows tired and melancholic, and he describes feeling like “a hot lobster / canned inside your all-day breakfast / life has never felt more tedious …” But he also takes on honestly recollecting what that past looked like for him: “I felt nothing for a decade—only extremities.” Sharma shows us that it is possible to mourn both kinds of realities: the reality of being addicted and feeling “smudged in a blur” and the tediousness that comes with letting go of those heightened sensations.
Boiled Owls is an all-encompassing collection that captures the nuances of struggling with addiction, and it does so without feeling overwhelming or overstimulating. Time and again, Sharma shows that in pain, there is tenderness; in addiction, there is hope. But through this collection, Sharma also takes accountability for hurting those he loves. “I cheated on you with a substance,” he writes for his partner. “You are tired of hearing apologies / this amends is living / in my abdomen / tense with the past’s sun.” Sharma holds his accountability and guilt with his past mistakes. What results is an evocative story about finding love and forgiveness on a new path and illuminating how life can evolve past addiction and its grip.
Boiled Owls, by Azad Ashim Sharma. Brooklyn, New York: Nightboat Books, March 2024. 72 pages. $17.95, paper.
Rina Shamilov (she/they) is an MFA candidate at the University of Notre Dame, where she studies poetry. She is a nonfiction editor at MayDay and a managing editor at the Notre Dame Review. Her work is either published or forthcoming in The Foundationalist, Club Plum Lit, Mulberry Literary, Pink Disco, Udolpho Magazine, VENUUS, Lilith, and New Voices, where she serves as an arts and culture editor.
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