Written each day in rehab, Ash Winters' debut collection is a vulnerable and powerful portrait of the struggle against addiction.
Description
"This is a weird place to wake up / For someone who has woken up in some pretty strange places before." Run Riot is a collection of ninety poems, one written each day during Ash Winters' ninety day stay at a Vancouver rehab centre. A fiercely personal account of what it feels like to stop drinking after a decade of excess, Run Riot takes the reader through moments of determination, anger, hilarity, and heartbreak. Winter's frank account of early sobriety offers companionship to those who know it well and insight for those that want to know it better. Weaving the past and the present together with ruthless vulnerability, Run Riot is a powerful portrait of one person's struggle against addiction, laying bare an honest search to heal and better understand one's self.
Reviews
"Run Riot: Ninety Poems in Ninety Days is a raw, honest meditation on Winters' struggles with addiction, sobriety, and self-acceptance. Like Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Roxane Gay's Hunger, Run Riot is a memoir about how one copes with and embodies trauma. Amidst scenes of profound vulnerability are surprising moments of levity that carry the poet and the reader through the darker days."
--Read With Pride, readwithpride.org
“Frank, touching and sometimes wryly humorous … There’s a gritty honesty about those emotions — fear, shame and self-loathing, for a start — but the poems are not raw jottings, for Winters often mirrors inner feelings with revealing metaphors.”
—Toronto Star