A special bundle offer on:

• Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead - shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025

• Juana Adcock’s I Sugar the Bones - shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025 and the Saltire Book Award for Poetry 2025

• Azad Ashim Sharma’s Boiled Owls - shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2025

• Fady Joudah’s […] - shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2024 and the National Book Award for Poetry 2024

Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize for Poetry 2025

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.

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

‘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

All six of our 2024 poetry titles, for a special price of £45:

• […] by Fady Joudah

• Boiled Owls by Azad Ashim Sharma

• Down by Rebecca McCutcheon

• Bark, Archive, Splinter by Jay Gao

• Tongueless by Rojbîn Arjen Yiğit

• I Sugar the Bones by Juana Adcock