Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance: 2 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 195604616X ISBN 13: 9781956046168

Verlag: Sarabande Books, Incorporated, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

An anthology edited by acclaimed poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis.

In 1997, Sarabande published Last Call, a poetry anthology which became a formative text on the lived experiences of addiction. Now, more than twenty-five years later, editors Kaveh Akbar and Pagie Lewis offer a contemporary follow-up. Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance showcases work from poets like Joy Harjo, Afaa M. Weaver, Diane Seuss, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, and Ocean Vuong, as well as many new and powerful voices. 

Contributors: Samuel Ace, Chase Berggrun, Sherwin Bitsui, Sophie Cabot Black, Jericho Brown, Anthony Ceballos, Marianne Chan, jos charles, Brendan Constantine, Cynthia Cruz, Steven Espada Dawson, Megan Denton Ray, Martín Espada, Megan Fernandes, Sarah Gorham, Joy Harjo, Mary Karr, Sophie Klahr, Michael Klein, Dana Levin, Ada Limón, Zach Linge, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Airea Dee Matthews, Joshua Mehigan, Tomás Q. Morín, Erin Noehrem, Joy Priest, Dana Roeser, sam sax, Diane Seuss, Natalie Shapero, Katie Jean Shinkle, Jeffrey Skinner, Bernardo Wade, Afaa M. Weaver, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Phillip B. Williams, Ocean Vuong

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Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022). In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr!, Kaveh's first novel.

In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX."

Paige Lewis is the author of the poetry collection Space Struck (Sarabande 2019), cited as “One of the best debuts of the year” in “Must-Read Poetry, 2019” by The Millions. They are a recipient of the 2016 Editor’s Award in Poetry from The Florida Review as well as a Gregory Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal. Their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Best New Poets 2017, and elsewhere. They currently live and teach in Iowa City, IA.

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Introduction 

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” 

If you erase in reverse, you’re revealing. Both erasing and revealing are ways of showing what always existed. Erasing says, ‘I shall chisel away the marble to free the David.’ Revelation says, ‘You are the chisel.’

It’s easy to cut things out of a life. Relatively. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s really killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: don’t lie, don’t cheat or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis, the misguided belief that goodness is built on a kind of constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without directly violently striking an unhoused person with his own hands and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Cliff bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. 

Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us in recovery sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like slicing an onion or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. 

For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. For an addict, there’s nothing but the drug. For me (Kaveh), there was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. There was nothing of my life that wasn’t set in motion by that narcotic gravity. 

Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and love and more than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not kick every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet. 

For many of the poets assembled here, poetry was a place to put themselves while on that journey. Joy Priest writes, “I’m 31 days sober, deciding to lead myself beyond January.” Sophie Klahr writes, “I am a waiting room, crowded with sound.” Language is a place to go as the new self forms, a safe place to store a body and mind. 

My brain—the same organ that controls my breathing and my heartbeat and the contractions of my intestinal muscles—that’s the organ that wants me to drink and use again. What hope does language have against such a formidable foe?  What hope is there in self-will, in abstinence? 

The only hope I’ve found is in other people. Nobody gets sober in a vacuum, and that’s why when Sarabande approached us about doing this anthology, it felt important to everyone that I, an addict in sober recovery for nearly a decade, work alongside my spouse and partner Paige Lewis, whose life has been inflected by my addiction and recovery nearly as much as my own. That’s the thing about addiction—the addict is only one of a wide web of people whose lives are indelibly changed by their disease. 

For countless poets in this anthology, it’s not their own experience of addiction that’s altered the trajectory of their living, but the suffering of a beloved. Poet Airea D. Matthews writes of “large lots of unbeing / passed // down one generation to / the next.” Steven Espada Dawson opens a poem called “My Brother Stole Every Spoon in the House” by saying, “so we don’t eat soup anymore.” The shadow of addiction is almost always larger than the life of the addict, and many of the voices gathered here testify to loving a person from that lightless, desperate place. 

This anthology is by no means an exhaustive volume or even a representative one. What it feels like to us is a poetry mixtape, lovingly curated and organized for you, dear reader, that it might usefully illuminate or complicate or accompany you in your living. Reading, making yourself permeable to these poets’ voices—that is decidedly active, and opposite the relative passivity of abstinence. Addicts are not bad people struggling to get good, they’re sick people struggling to get well. As Diane Seuss writes in one of her poems contained here: “Where’s the melody / to remedy the melody, the remedy to remedy the remedy?”

Here are x poems, some written by people actively battling addiction, some written by people who’ve been sober for years or decades, and others still written by poets who do not identify as addicts themselves but love or have loved addicted persons. Each poem in this volume fits in one of these three categories; that is the only organizing conceit Paige and I had in its curation. Besides that, we make no claims at objectivity—these are poems, written in English by still-living poets (remove either of those modifiers and the size of the book balloons), that both of us love. Organizing them has been a wellspring of experience, strength, and hope for us, giving us myriad occasions for meditation and contemplation and laughter and reflection. It is our fervent hope, in putting the anthology into the world now, that you too may find yourself accompanied by these voices. 

—Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sarabande Books, Incorporated
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 195604616X
• ISBN 13: 9781956046168
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 150
• Herausgeber: Akbar Kaveh, Lewis Paige
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar