Sobriety and Other Unfinished Funerals

What if the hardest thing about getting sober is admitting that, in many ways, drinking worked? Sobriety and Other Unfinished Funerals rejects the anodyne story of addiction as unbroken misery followed by triumphant recovery. The drinking years were destructive, absolutely, but they were also warm, funny, and communal. In the beginning, alcohol made possible things that had never even been imagined possible: belonging, confidence, intimacy, and relief from the daily anxieties of the world. Moving from the bars of Los Angeles to a childhood bedroom in Ohio and through the interminable, often uneventful, years that follow, these poems examine what happens when the cure does not feel like a reward. Sobriety arrives without revelation or applause or possibly even much notice. It is coffee left on the counter, keys placed in a ceramic dish, eleven dishes washed at night, and nineteen bags of salt counted in a hardware-store parking lot. Darkly funny, resistant to cloying sentimentality, and painfully candid, this collection is not an inspirational recovery story. It is a book about memory, loneliness, loss, ordinary endurance, and grieving something that feels dead yet remains alive enough that you know it might return. Sobriety is not the end of wanting. It is the condition of continuing-and choosing, for one more day, not to go back.