Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time

There is no single theme that binds together 's collaged poems, essay-fragments, diary entries, and dream sequences. An experiment in longing for collective duration, yearning for touch in an embrace between friends, and the desire for meaningful social change, is Azad Ashim Sharma's first full-length collection of hybrid writing. As the product of a reading practice and an attempt at reclaiming embodiment from the atomising of time in an increasingly digital workplace, formed during the pandemic whilst reading Byung Chul-Han, Lewis R. Gordon, Fred Moten, Jacques Derrida, Nathaniel Mackey, and Karen Barad. This is auto-theory as lyric amalgam; a collection of thresholds along the desire lines of otherhood; a prayer against the onslaught of capital's deracination of time itself; an incantation or spell cast out by turning the page into the open space of streets populated by protest.