The Echo Chamber - Caroline Bird and Kaveh Akbar

Poet Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's poetry archive and selects The Echo Chamber with Caroline Bird and Kaveh Akbar who talk addiction, writing and recovery with presenter Paul Farley.

'My assigned counsellor told me I used
poetry to hide from myself, unhook
the ballast from my life; a floating ruse
of surreal jokes.'

Paul Farley brings together two poets working on opposite sides of the Atlantic whose latest work explores addiction and recovery with surrealism and dark wit. Caroline Bird's fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, while the Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf was published in the UK in early 2018 to great acclaim.

Produced by Mair Bosworth.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2018.