Azad Ashim Sharma

In Boiled Owls, Azad Ashim Sharma delves into the kaleidoscopic terrain of cocaine addiction to explore the strain it puts on his speaker's interior, as well as family and those in close proximity. 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.

"I am a muslim not a terrorist" is Azad Ashim Sharma's opening gambit in Against the Frame. The book's geography is vast; encompassing Meccan sands, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Barking, East London. Sharma opens brand-new avenues for political poetry in short bursts of incandescent rage, washing his hands of the burden of catering to, in Sean Bonney's words, "a small racist island" and writing, brilliantly, the truth.

There is no single theme that binds together Ergastulum's collaged poems, essay-fragments, diary entries, and dream sequences. An experiment in longing for collective duration, yearning for touch in an embrace between friends, and the desire for meaningful social change, Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time is Azad Ashim Sharma's first full-length collection of hybrid writing. As the product of a reading practice and an attempt at reclaiming embodiment from the atomising of time in an increasingly digital workplace, Ergastulum formed during the pandemic whilst reading Byung Chul-Han, Lewis R. Gordon, Fred Moten, Jacques Derrida, Nathaniel Mackey, and Karen Barad. This is auto-theory as lyric amalgam; a collection of thresholds along the desire lines of otherhood; a prayer against the onslaught of capital's deracination of time itself; an incantation or spell cast out by turning the page into the open space of streets populated by protest.

At the edge of diasporic (sub)urban being - an imperceptible in/visibility, an opacity to the violent racial fetish of brownness - haunting the neuro-fascism of the police state, the state of the situation - a secret, on the edge, losing one's mind - disappearing in the shining en-lighten-ment, undoing cartographies of white terror and death. Let the sub/urban riotous/righteous run amok. This is Outer London in the Black House - tracing a darker shade of communism ...