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.

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.

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), Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and the forthcoming Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books, 2024). 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. He lives in London.