Triumph of the Lost Cause

Jimin Seo examines Azad Ashim Sharma’s collection “Boiled Owls.”

By Jimin SeoMarch 13, 2025

• Poetry

IN EDWARD SAID’S Tanner Lecture “On Lost Causes,” the “lost cause” is a hopeless one. Despite the circumstances that drives the soul to catastrophe, the lost cause is, and always will be, without future or hope. The promise of its original potential is lost, and the soul is split in two. What the soul once was haunts in perpetuity: the soul as lost cause. Surely, this is too fatalistic a view, and so Said, through a close reading of Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1920) and Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615), makes an injunction: shouldn’t the lost cause be allowed to regain hope, to regain their potential, retain their narrative? This is the premise by which the speaker in Azad Ashim Sharma’s Boiled Owls (2024) lives.

Sharma is a South Asian first-generation Londoner and a recovered addict growing up in the very empire that razed his ancestors’ country. The addict is the lost cause, and that addict is recovered. Yet to replace Sharma’s speaker with so fraught a noun as addict, who, by “cocaine odyssey [of] cutting and scraping and sniffing,” makes a life of poetry, it seems reductive to stress recovered in the past tense with finality, as if Sharma has graduated from the ill-regarded addict noun. This erases Sharma’s history of carving into his body, his mind, his psyche, narco-capital’s transfiguration into language’s most extreme occasion—the achievement of a narcopoetics. It is society’s habit to kick the addict to its extremities in order to hide the damage its structure allows. By turning to language’s most extreme occasion, that of poetry, Sharma brutally carves back into society a blistering critique of its narco-capital. It is no longer the individual who haplessly self-harms but society that bears the mark of its own harm.

Boiled Owls, Sharma’s US debut, is the odyssey between these extremes: the obliteration of the physical health by narcotics and the disruption of a capitalist machine by subverting the lost cause narrative through poetry. The tether between the writer and the book’s exchange marks a trade between what is made visible as the ill-body by dint of social shame and progress, against the healthy marker of the extreme citizen who foretells and corrects human suffering, the poet. Still, as the poet takes on the mantle of the Delphic oracle, the poet is also branded society’s pariah—another illness that must be expunged, reiterating Plato’s call to exile all poets from social influence. The speaker of Boiled Owls arrives as the exiled poet, and with this arrival, he offers us the society that created his circumstances of suffering and illness even as that same society continues to cast him out:

        Here, pain is a rich tapestry of historical subjectification
        & more lines will flow as dysregulated animal sensoria

        lo!        in moonlit atmospheres the vortices have me
        sovereign, synchronic, somnambulant, mortality checked

        by the good life running course as I clutch this new day.

Yes, pain is the root of being a citizen-subject, one subjected to the rules of social living, not to mention colonial history. The irregular pacing of each word mimics the disruption of selfhood under colonial rule in both language and daily living. “More lines” suggests lines of cocaine to order, scrape, and sniff, yet also lines of verse spiraling in “dysregulated animal sensoria.” The vantage of the speaker is moonlit, and for one moment “sovereign,” as the writing act grants Sharma’s speaker the euphoric high once achieved by using narcotics. This serves as a critique. What does it mean to have a good day under “a rich tapestry of historical / subjectification”? Sharma asks.

        in glass stained green      with hindsight’s bitter pill.
        Geopolitics tints     tradition’s wayside      grunge

        and I am raging at the point of narcocapital’s promise:
        parcellated happiness in grainy levamisole’s rotted flesh

        Borderline with my atoms I try to help other people find
        the lettuce      my functionality      still mask the contours

Writing after Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, Sharma offers us a world abandoned by God. It is poetry that must piece together the broken utopia where humans and gods once coexisted. The poem depicts survival as an ongoing yearning for the utopic world God long ago abandoned. Is “society” God’s substitute and “community” his bickering offspring? Sharma, “questioning / what community is if not forced togetherness,” looks backwards at a wholeness he will never know. Paradise is never regained. It is “hindsight’s bitter pill” or, in another poem, “hindsight blunted, oceanic.” The split between utopia and the modern world is the life of the subject before addiction, and the building of a life to live beyond it. Still, Sharma forces the reader to contend with whether a world can be mended when it seems beyond repair, the difference between the well adjusted and the lost cause constituting the geopolitical equivalence of narco-capital’s promise.   

The addict is always recovering from the ravaging effects of narcotics, recovering from the world that procures it for him. At the same time, the addict, thrust again into the world, tries his best to recover society from the very illness that proliferates addiction in the first place: “This country is obsessed with white power/powder” and “1 in 50 people use it every day in London,” and yet, the addict demands, “I want to know right now what the statistic is for people who can peel a satsuma without it breaking. / That is a statistic worth fighting for, I think, as I lay out another line and inhale.” The present of living, for Sharma, is to always be recovering, mucking through the thin borders between his subject’s own atoms, as well as between himself and a world he cannot sublimate. In a mutilation of subjective vision, Sharma portrays a gesture of blinding as the means to reach “a feeling”: “I took your palm close to me and rubbed out my eyes / focused on yr unconscious constellation: a public feeling.” The private is subsumed into the public. The self is obliterated, and the addict recognized only as a lost cause. The dehumanization of the addict is captured by the paradox of being society’s object of scrutiny and, at the same time, disregard. This is the public feeling Sharma invokes. The cost is the privacy of the soul. The final stage of white capital power transforms the soul into white powder. Human privacy is consumed.

Like Said’s example of a literary lost cause, there is something quixotic about Sharma’s subjects. A near-indefatigable optimism pervades the poems, a belief that society can be bettered. While Sharma’s quest is not to restore chivalry or civil order, he bears a will to be, and to do, good. The speaker is not a passive oracle but an active agent, riding his own proverbial donkey-become-steed into the fields. There is a sense of romantic and filial duty—“I try to help other people find”—as he expresses care toward a brother:

                                                    I tried to hide
                                        my breakfast lines from you
                                and made art from yearning.
                        Unlike typical siblings
                we fought in a red silence
        grainy with domestic neorealism
                I want to be someone for you
                        present in this life and after
                                holding your face as you held mine
                                        no longer in fear of tomorrow.

Even as the speaker is in the midst of recovery, he expresses an impetus for doing good. Beyond self-gain, he is motivated by the love and care for a brother who witnesses the speaker suffering from addiction. This brother reciprocates care for the speaker through a simple domestic gesture:

                                This morning you asked me
                        if it was fine that you took
                my slippers worried
        I think my feet would be cold
                on the slate tiles in our kitchen.
                        It will be fine. You said it
                                twice. It will be fine.
                                        The slate is cold
                                                I don’t mind
                                        it wasn’t cold in the sun.

The brother reiterates and recalls in childlike lexicon—“It will be fine. You said it / twice. It will be fine”—with genuine concern for the speaker’s health. The speaker’s response later in the poem, “I love you because you are,” reflects the brother’s innocence, alluding to a potential cognitive difference. This difference in cognition is made firm at the poem’s closing when the brother “make[s] sounds that escape […] Two carers lead the way / Your other carer is at home / […] We are all sad. / A sadness tinged.” Like Cervantes’s Quixote, who makes a career of doing good while still bearing his own mania, Sharma’s speaker must similarly care for others as he struggles to care for himself. Sharma presents a community united by shared sadness, and yet, like Cervantes, he presents broken subjects with unbreakable spirits. The movement toward moral clarity, despite God’s abandonment, is in itself a kind of victory. Sharma’s world rotates together within the orbit of his beloveds, troubling the narrative of the recovering addict as lost cause. Sharma continues his critique by locating, in the world at large, the mania and delusion seemingly exclusive to the lost cause:

In May 2019, King’s College London and the University of Suf-
folk collaborated and found that 100% of fresh water shrimp
tested positive for traces of cocaine.

Imagine that.

Wired and absolutely fucking mad shrimp.

At the University of Naples Federico II, they’ve looked into how
cocaine traces are fucking with eels.

Yes, eels!

The eels are high and under duress.

Like the shrimp.

Cocaine is in the water.

There is something in the water.

They even make rehabs for eels now, giving them clean water
for 10 days to prevent muscle damage and lower their cortisol
levels.

Those poor shrimp can’t go to rehab; a rehab doesn’t exist for
shrimp.

The world is mad. Yet more spectacularly, the triage itself is a madness. Is the eel more superior kin? What good are shrimp? How is it that the world assigns more value between species when the suffering is equal? Sharma seems to ask. The designation of mania, from private to public blurs. In Sharma’s world, the very fact that the citizen must ask the question of a superior species, and its corresponding treatment, is a mad but true condition of being human in our present society. Madness is a condition of a world abandoned by God, not the illness of human individuals.

These are the conditions we live in. Still, Sharma deftly makes the case for the living voice to speak up in protest. The recovering addict’s voice becomes a powerful critique of what is wrong with the world. Though struck by addiction, the speaker instructs and critiques his world by the very act of surviving in mind and body:

I am writing to recover; I am writing to stay alive. […]

Recovery contained for me, and still does even as a possibility,
a sense of what Sianne Ngai calls ‘stuplimity’: a sense of ‘over-
whelming excitement and stultifying boredom emanating from
the same object’.

That object is, more accurately, an experience of time.

I found recovery stuplimitous, should such a word begin to sig-
nify.

For Sharma, recovery is not a means of regaining the self only, but more poignantly, recovery is a means to mend the world through observation, critique, and love. Sharma miraculously makes such mends through verse. The poet is often asked “what does poetry do,” to which they may respond, quoting Adrienne Rich, “tonight no poetry will serve.” Yet Sharma’s narcopoetics is a reminder that poetry can serve as an ethics. “I am writing to recover; I am writing to stay alive”: Sharma spins us a life of “stuplimity” that matches the excitement and boredom that makes our world spin. To recover is stuplimitous; through Sharma, doing so signifies the possibility of renewal. “We might well ask […] if any lost cause can ever really be lost,” Said wonders in his lecture’s closing remarks. Sharma’s humanity in recovery offers one potent answer.