Azad Ashim Sharma // Kevin Holden // Emily Lee Luan // jason b. crawford
The Word Is Change is pleased to host a poetry night in celebration of the New York launch for Azad Ashim Sharma’s 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 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
Azad Ashim Sharma is a writer and publisher based in South London. He is the director of the87press. His work includes Against the Frame and Ergastulum. 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 lives in London.
A book of prismatic, lyrical poems that enhance and disrupt the pastoral tradition to consider organic and mineral worlds, queer desire and experience, the mathematical and the spiritual, struggle and resistance.
Pink Noise orbits in spaces of memory, longing, violence, solidarity, the ecological, and the mystical. Experimental in its forms and lexicon, in poems ranging widely in style and scale, it moves through layers of musical intensity as it reworks the visual space of the page to generate sensations of presence and revelation. Simultaneously lucid and syntactically disjunctive, these poems are queer and radical not only in their content, but in their grammar.
“In Pink Noise, sometimes like a crackling icicle you see a glimmer of diamond dust, pink by nature. Here, in this book of poems. The lines are electric, conveying a new kind of sensuality, all quick and zapped. An oncoming fusion of poetic thinking with the sciences. Exciting! What we’ve been waiting for.”
—Fanny Howe
Kevin Holden is a poet, translator, and essayist. His books include Solar, which won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Birch, which won the Ahsahta Press Chapbook Award. He is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Through the recurrence of memory, myth, and grief, 回 / Return captures the elusory language of sorrow and solitude that binds Taiwanese diasporic experience.
Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?
“Emily Lee Luan’s stunning reflections on sorrow haunt the sensorium. This sorrow—or ‘an anger rooted in sadness’—is untranslatable, rooted in the violence of colonization, displacement, and deracination. And yet Luan’s poems, which alloy Chinese and English into feats of formal ingenuity and beauty, translate the unspeakable.” —Cathy Park Hong
A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Emily Lee Luan is the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
Jason B. Crawford's Year of the Unicorn Kidz beautifully explores existence on the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Their profound navigation of identity, violence, and desire transcends boundaries and binaries.
Vulnerability takes the centre stage as the speaker of these descriptive and passionate poems unburies old relationships and haunting memories. Year of the Unicorn Kidz reads like a coming-of-age story for marginalized youth in America, sketching the body in terms of disconnection, loss, and the explosive nature of desire. From burning rage to healing friendships to the thrill of forbidden encounters and the regrets that follow them, Crawford revisits the reckless elements of youth that capture the inner and outer conflicts of self-discovery. They bring incredible depth to their poetry with urgent and vivid storytelling that delicately reveals the complexity of reality, while also leaving room for readers to reflect on their own.
jason b. crawford (They/He/She) is a writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut Full-Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz is out from Sundress Publications. crawford holds a Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. They are a 2023 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Metro Weekly, AGNI Magazine, Foglifter Magazine, Four Way Review, Cincinnati Review, Frontier Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. They hold an MFA in poetry from The New School. Their second collection YEET! was the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published in Fall 2025.
Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk.
COVID PROTOCOLS: We always have masks available in the store. For events, which involve sitting in close contact for a longer period of time, masks are recommended and we appreciate your participation. We keep us safe.