Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance

by Kaveh Akbar (Editor), Paige Lewis (Editor), Joy Harjo (Contribution by), Bernardo Wade (Contribution by), Megan Denton Ray (Contribution by)

Overview

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

In 1997, Sarabande published Last Call, a poetry anthology that became a formative text on the lived experiences of addiction. Now, more than twenty-five years later, editors Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis offer this companion volume for a new generation. 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956046168
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Pages:	150
Sales rank:	245,798
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

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

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

Introduction, Kaveh Akbar & Paige Lewis 

Running, Joy Harjo 

This Shit Is Not Interesting, Bernardo Wade 

Requiem for Guy, Bernardo Wade 

A Recovery Guide for Adult Children of Alcoholics, Megan Denton Ray 

Trouble House, Megan Denton Ray 

i., jos charles 

ii., jos charles 

Dominion, Afaa M. Weaver 

On Alcohol, sam sax 

Palinode, sam sax 

The Walnut House, Marianne Chan 

The Cannon on the Hood of My Father’s Car, Martín Espada 

The Bouncer’s Confession, Martín Espada 

Branches, Zach Linge

Every Song You’d Play While High Is Haunted Now, Zach Linge 

Cold Turkey, Joshua Mehigan 

Why We Drink, Megan Fernandes 

My Friend Says I Should Be Thinking About “Masked Intimacy” When I Think About Leila Olive, The Cyborg Jillian Weise 

After the War I Dreamt of Nothing But the War, Sophie Klahr 

Listening to the Radio, Driving Through Nevada Again, Sophie Klahr 

Drinking Money, Michael Klein 

Ghostwork, Michael Klein 

The Caravan, Sherwin Bitsui 

Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth, Phillip B. Williams 

[untitled], Diane Seuss 

[untitled], Diane Seuss 

Death Star, Cynthia Cruz 

Forming, Cynthia Cruz 

Carità Americana, Tomás Q. Morín 

VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God, Mary Karr 

Illiterate Progenitor, Mary Karr 

Eccles. 9:7, Chase Berggrun 

The Forty-Third Day, Chase Berggrun 

Legacy, Airea D. Matthews 

Ars Poetica, 1979, Airea D. Matthews 

A Controlled Substance, Brendan Constantine 

A Tour de Force, Brendan Constantine 

Good Share, Natalie Shapero 

My Brother Stole Every Spoon in the House, Steven Espada Dawson 

At the Arcade I Paint Your Footprints, Steven Espada Dawson 

The Family Afterward, Sarah Gorham 

Overdose, Sophie Cabot Black 

from WHEREAS, Layli Long Soldier 

Body of Magnesia, Dana Levin 

Call Your Mother (Fentanyl), Katie Jean Shinkle 

Blue Heart Baby, Joy Priest 

The Collar, Joy Priest

Fluctuations in the Field, Jeffrey Skinner 

Reunion, Jeffrey Skinner 

Until We Meet Again, Anthony Ceballos 

Listerine Dream, Anthony Ceballos 

The Chute, Sharon Olds 

Saturn, Sharon Olds 

Transparent Things, God-Sized Hole, Dana Roeser 

Track 1: Lush Life, Jericho Brown 

Tall, Pale, Wild Fall, Erin Noehre 

I finally made it through the birds the birds, Samuel Ace 

Standing at a Desk of Cranberries, Samuel Ace 

The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road, Ada Limón 

Reasons for Staying, Ocean Vuong

Editorial Reviews

The Rumpus, "The Most Beautiful Books of 2023"

Official selection of The Rumpus’s Poetry Book Club

Caroline, Bookseller and Events Coordinator at Prologue Bookshop, "Top Reads of 2023"

Carmichael's Bookstore, "Favorite Books of 2023"

"Joy Harjo begins the collection with 'Running.'. . . Following this breathtaking opener are Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, Airea D. Matthews, Sharon Olds, Ocean Vuong, and other voices offering lyrics, prose poems, and more experimental verse plumbing the depths of substance abuse, the possibility of emerging from its hold, and living in its aftermath."

—Poets & Writers, "The Anthologist: A Compendium of Uncommon Collections"

"This resonates as one of the most important anthologies in recent memory. Akbar and Lewis have expertly curated a collection of poets whose respective talents give language to one of the most pervasive and difficult circumstances in contemporary society. And in the end, as Akbar predicts in the opening pages, we find hope in the people that tell their stories, hope in the poems that insist not just on survival but on joy."

—The Poetry Question

"Joy Harjo, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, Airea D. Matthews, Sharon Olds, Ocean Vuong, and other voices offer work with which to plumb the depths of substance abuse, the possibility of emerging from its hold, and living in its aftermath."

—A Room of One's Own Bookstore

"This stunning anthology is a must read for anyone whose life has been affected by addiction-and any poetry aficionado. Brimming with grief, heartache, humor, and even joy, these poems capture every facet of dependency and recovery. Quite a few made me weep. Lots of heavy hitters from stars in contemporary poetry, such as Ocean Vuong, Ada Limon, Sharon Olds, and many more. "

—Caroline, Bookseller and Events Coordinator at Prologue Bookshop, "Top Reads of 2023"

“Why do I feel so at home among the poems and poets of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance? There is nothing more human, haunted, humbling, and bottom line, than the desire that fuels addiction and recovery—and poetry. In reading this brilliant anthology, I feel less alone. I’ve found my people.”

—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for frank: sonnets

"What better gift to all of us than this wide and deep collection of poems about what enriches all our humanity, the desire to move through each day with that clarity we call sobriety, and how that helps all of us to be more fully human.”

—Afaa M. Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills

“That writer lore: that one needs alcohol, conscious-altering substances, narcotic meandering—to be one of the greats—still reigns strong. But the discovery that there were great writers in recovery brought me over, as Sharon Olds writes here, to ‘the side of life,’ where I could become and become closer to myself. This anthology celebrates the true spiritual work that writing demands and sobriety gifts.”

—Joy Priest, author of Horsepower

From the Publisher