In addiction is a sweet dark room, Amanda Nicole Corbin shares her own story of recovery, recounting the dark depths of drinking and the light thereafter.

She “unlock[s] the cage in her chest and release[s] a thousand flaming moths of her past.” Corbin introduces a teenager creating freedom with abandon, describes the loneliness of apartments full of empty bottles, and tracks the nonlinear journey of her healing. Empathetic but never sentimental, these poems avoid romanticizing her former life and reintroduce her restored self to those who waited. Free from the control of alcohol, she instead chooses to “drink in the sounds of what it means to have meaning.”