THE WEIGHT OF AIR

A journalist and activist recounts his years battling the opiates that helped quiet a lifelong, deep-running depression.

In this painful, haunting memoir, Poses takes us on a roller-coaster ride: bouts of heroin abuse mixed in with periods of sobriety, which will give readers hope for his prospects—only to have them dashed. Throughout, the author is a sympathetic guide to what it’s like to be addicted and seemingly hopeless. He is soulful, achingly honest, and often deadpan, portraying a battered innocence beset by a neurological illness, and he ably conveys his existential struggle: “Will my body ever learn to shut down without dope? Will my brain ever shut up?” Poses keenly expresses his gyroscope of emotions, showing a psyche that is seemingly never at peace. In one scene, the author sits at an airport bar, thinking about how he doesn’t like to drink alcohol. “If the bartender had said ‘We have morphine on intravenous drip, Percocet and Dilaudid pills, and transdermal fentanyl patches,’ I’d be high right now. I don’t know how else to feel okay in my own skin. And I don’t see God or AA changing that or helping me accept or forget it.” After college, the author took jobs in advertising and finance (he disliked both; he wanted to write) and then tumbled from the wagon once again. Poses vividly portrays the epic, agonizing pain of his withdrawals, most of which were spent “drenched in sweat and freezing cold, sitting on the toilet with my head in a plastic trash bin, a miasmic stew of shit and piss and puke.” Ultimately, some form of redemption arrives, and the author concludes with a concise, well-informed chapter on fundamental recovery, which “heals the wounds that led you to use drugs in the first place,” and the persistent problems associated with shame, poverty, and misinformation. Readers will cheer for Poses.

A potent addition to the literature on drug addiction and recovery.