addiction is a sweet, dark room / amanda corbin / 2024
With a voice as clear and gentle as a sun shower, addiction is a sweet dark room artfully guides the reader through a young woman’s coming-of-age, as well as her struggle overcoming alcoholism. Here, we do not get a gritty performance of degradation that voyeuristic readers demand from writers of addiction. Rather, corbin provides a surefooted rhythm, whose careful pace reads in part as a guard against former missteps. We get a clear-eyed diction that—like all the best poetry—will stretch your vocabulary, mostly by showing you the hidden pockets inside of even familiar phrases. While Hemingway encouraged aspirants to write drunk, corbin has crafted a soulfulness within an aesthetic of sobriety, and it is in these sober reflections where the collection sings at its best: as in “longevity,” where the speaker and her grandmother share a moment of light within the darkness of addiction, or “welcome wagon,” where the drama of the early days of the pandemic loses its punch when compared to what corbin has already survived. addiction is a sweet dark room is a testament that recovery, even in its smallness, its lack of glamour, and its imperfections, is worth it.