Kaveh Akbar

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

Poems

Calling a Wolf a Wolf

from PERSONAL INVENTORY: FEARLESS (TEMPORIS FILA)

rain/anagha

if being alive hadn’t seemed so effortless,

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 EVERYTHING THAT MOVES IS ALIVE AND A THREAT—A REMINDER

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

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

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

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

I am not a slow learner     I am a quick forgetter

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

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

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.

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 

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

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