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Ergastulum: Azad Ashim Sharma

Azad Ashim Sharma offers us something very unique in Ergastulum. The torrent of his disciplined yet melodic poetry does not only travel with forceful grace. Rather, his aesthetic precision and uncompromising craftsmanship cut through with elegantly disorienting eloquence: love, anger, sadness, substance abuse, race, labor, and revolt, only to unbind and bind them tightly in a politics of the poetic that weaves through London, Palestine, and Kashmir. Passionate, brilliant, lyrical, and affective, Ergastulum will be known for having established Azad as undoubtedly one of the most complex and talented poets of his generation.  

— Stephen Sheehi, Camera Palaestina: Photography and The Displaced Histories of Palestine.

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Excerpt from ERGASTULUM: Vignettes of Lost Time

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Azad Ashim Sharma

Azad Ashim Sharma is based in South London. He is the director of the87press. His work includes Against the Frame (Barque Press, 2017) and the forthcoming collections of poetry and prose Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books, 2023). A 5th anniversary edition of Against the Frame is planned for late-2022 release by Broken Sleep Books and will feature new poems under that heading. Azad’s poetry has been published recently by Stand Magazine, the Asian American Writers Workshop and Gutter Magazine. His prose has been published by SPAMzine, MIR Online, Magma Magazine, Poetry Wales, and is forthcoming in the Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Poetry in Ireland and the UK. Azad is currently a CHASE Student at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing a novel alongside a book of critical theory.

Traffic Report

Small Press Traffic is a Bay Area seedbed for poets who push boundaries in the arts. We present programs, publications, and curatorial opportunities with an ethos of radical inclusivity. Committed to this mission since 1974, we highlight diverse, multidisciplinary, and intergenerational practitioners in our public programs, and prioritize equity, accessibility, and collaboration in our working model. SPT also stewards an archive of small press material produced and circulated in the Bay Area over the last half century.

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