Kaveh Akbar
Alice James Books
I try not to think of God as a debt to luck but for years I consumed nothing that did not harm me and still I lived, witless
as a bird flying over state lines.
—from “Personal Inventory: Fearless (Temporis Fila)”
When I got sober, poetry became my life raft. Every poem in was written from a few months to a few years after I got sober. I had no idea what to do with myself, what to do with my physical body or my time. I had no relationship to any kind of living that wasn’t predicated on the pursuit of narcotic experience. In a very real way, sobriety sublimated one set of addictions (narcotic) into another (poetic). The obsessiveness, the compulsivity, is exactly the same. All I ever want to do today is write poems, read poems, talk about poems. But this new obsession is much more fun (and much easier on my physiological/psychological/spiritual self).
