Name: Calling a Wolf a Wolf
Rating: 4.55 (20 reviews)
ISBN: 9781938584671

Kaveh Akbar

Addiction. Recovery. Repeat. Akbar blazes the poetry scene with this introspective, powerful and passionate debut.

Poems

Calling a Wolf a Wolf

from “stop me if you’ve heard this one before”

sage lynn

Sometimes / you have to march all the way to Galilee / or the literal foot of God himself before you realize / you’ve already passed the place where / you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember / the being afraid, only that it came to an end.

from “portrait of the alcoholic with moths and river”

to make life first you need a dying star / this seems important with you so close to / collapsing yourself      the mute swans final / burst of song       I know you’ve tried this before / when they asked where it hurt you motioned in / a circle to the ground under your feet

l🌀

Every day / my body follows me around asking / for things. I try to think louder, try / to be brilliant, wildly brilliant. We all want / the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder, / like the first man to hear a parrot speak), but we live / on an enormous flatness floating between / two oceans.

it’s a myth / that love lives in the heart     it lives in the throat we push it out / when we speak     when we gasp we take a little for ourselves

rain/anagha

I’m becoming more a vessel of memories than a person 

I am not a slow learner     I am a quick forgetter

I’ve been so young for so many years it’s all starting to jumble together 

he’d say if you’re not happy in your own yard

from UNBURNABLE THE COLD IS FLOODING OUR LIVES

I envy their discipline but not enough to do anything about it

I blame my culture     I blame everyone but myself

from EVERYTHING THAT MOVES IS ALIVE AND A THREAT—A REMINDER

whether we’re paying attention or not. The options: repair

from DESPITE THEIR SIZE CHILDREN ARE EASY TO REMEMBER THEY WATCH YOU

for others it’s harder and hardly seems worth doing                   the better a life

from PERSONAL INVENTORY: FEARLESS (TEMPORIS FILA)

if being alive hadn’t seemed so effortless,

I could not be held responsible for desire he could not be held at all In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, the reality of love can all too often prove disappointing at best, and life-threateningly ineffectual at worst. As Kaveh Akbar puts it in 'Heritage', a poem dedicated to an Iranian woman executed for killing the man who was attempting to rape her: 'in books love can be war-ending/...in life we hold love up to the light/ to marvel at its impotence.' Yet, as it brings us along on its author's struggle with addiction, this darkly sumptuous first collection by an award-winning poet also shows us that there can, after all, be a power and a beauty to our desires, in the strength of their flow, in their achievements and frustrations, and in the pain and joy of denying oneself for one's own sake. These are poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, and for knowledge. They find the speaker poised between life's clatter and rattle, wanting to retreat yet hungering for more; and, though they rush forward at full tilt through a stream of reflections, memories and emotions, they are never simply indulgent. This refreshingly honest and often breathtaking addition to the canon of addiction literature will carry readers with it just as the poet is carried, and leave behind indelible images of an existence richly felt.

mighty dragon 

"The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." --Fanny Howe This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight. From "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before" Sometimes you just have to leave whatever's real to you, you have to clomp through fields and kick the caps off all the toadstools. Sometimes you have to march all the way to Galilee or the literal foot of God himself before you realize you've already passed the place where you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember the being afraid, only that it came to an end. Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.

one of the most enjoyable poetry collections i’ve found on my own. i’m very glad i read it.

elif sinem

I'm gonna round up my 3.5 here because there were great lines throughout, but overall I felt so distanced from the poems and i thought I connected to them very very late considering the breadth of the poems on this thing. I really liked it when the distance of the words used matched with the poet's personal history but they weren't as many as I'd have liked. The poem that gives the collection its title is my personal favorite.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf Poems

Reviews

Highlights