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4.29 AVERAGE
4.29 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
Sometimes I start thinking I don't like poetry anymore, and then I read a collection like this. Clear and surprising at the same time. Dramatic and understated at the same time. Poems about the biggest of questions and the smallest of details.
Highly recommended, especially if you're interested in addiction and god and figuring out how to be a person in the world.
Highly recommended, especially if you're interested in addiction and god and figuring out how to be a person in the world.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
A stunning volume of poems.
From the little I know of Kaveh Akbar’s biography, he has struggled with alcoholism, and nearly all of these poems reflect that and reflect the tensions between his Iranian heritage and American identity. Subjects like alcoholism and immigrant identity are well-worn and risk becoming…boring.
The same is true of the way Akbar weaves these subjects into his success as a poet. At one point the speaker describes himself “rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers/ while they applaud and sip their scotch.” Which, yeah, I get how strange and humiliating that must feel, but if you’re a poet with a sizable audience, then let me play you the world’s smallest violin.
But Akbar continually wins my sympathy back. And he is aware of how he may appear to unsympathetic readers: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry./ This may be me at my best.” The voices in his poems are charming and heartbreaking, and the imagery is awesome. Here are some of my favorite lines and moments from this collection:
“a crimson robe floating/ up from the Gobi/ sand into prophet then back into sand”
“envy is the only deadly sin that’s no fun/ for the sinner”
“We all want/ the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,/ like the first man to hear a parrot speak)”
“You just don’t know yet which parts/ of yourself to value…/ your irises or their mothish obsession/ with light.”
“even our great-grandparents saw different blues owing/ to the rapid evolution of rods and cones”
“Do you know how hard it is to dig a new river?/ To be the single tongue in a sack full of teeth?”
“Mostly I want to be letters—not/ their sounds, but their shapes/ on a page. It must be exhilarating/ to be a symbol for everything at once:/ the bone caught in a child’s windpipe,/ the venom hiding in a snake’s jaw.”
“I pictured myself/ reduced to a warm globe of blood/ and yearned to become a sturdy in my end-/lessness, to grow heavy and terrible/ as molten iron poured down a throat.”
“the stomach/ of the girl who ate only hair was filled with hair they cut/ it out when she died it formed a mold of her stomach reducing/ a life to its most grotesque artifact”
“we now know some angels are more terrifying/ than others our enemies are replaceable the stones behind their teeth/ glow in moonlight”
“there were so many spiders/ your mouth a moonless system/ of caves filling with dust/ the dust thickened to tar/ your mouth opened and tar spilled out”
“Come to bed with me, you honest thing—/ let’s break into science. I’ll pluck you from my mouth/ like an apple seed, weep with you over other people’s lost pets./ The strangeness between us opens like a pinhole on the ocean floor:/ in floods a fishing boat, a Chinese seabird, an entire galaxy/ of starfish. We are learning so much so quickly. The sun/ is dying. The atom is reducible. The god-harnesses/ we thought we came with were just our tiny lungs.”
“Plants reinvent sugar daily/ and hardly anyone applauds.”
“There has been a swarm/ of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,/ I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds/ of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are/ arranging their plans like warms preparing/ to rise through the soil. They are ready to die/ with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.”
“sexless as a comma”
“I’m keyless as the language of twins”
“See how/ I am all rosejuice and wonderdrunk? See how/ my throat is filling with salt? Boil me. Divide/ me. Wrap me in paper and return me to earth. One day/ I will crack open underneath the field mushrooms./ One day I will wake up in someone else’s bones.”
“in Islam there are prayers to return almost anything even/ prayers to return faith I have been going through book after book pushing/ the sounds through my teeth I will keep making these noises/ as long as deemed necessary until there is nothing left of me to forgive”
So yes, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a remarkable, gorgeous collection of contemporary poetry by a poet I can’t help liking, even if the voices he cultivates wear on me a little bit at times. Indeed, the voices in these poems can get exasperating, but the moments of raw beauty more than make up for that.
From the little I know of Kaveh Akbar’s biography, he has struggled with alcoholism, and nearly all of these poems reflect that and reflect the tensions between his Iranian heritage and American identity. Subjects like alcoholism and immigrant identity are well-worn and risk becoming…boring.
The same is true of the way Akbar weaves these subjects into his success as a poet. At one point the speaker describes himself “rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers/ while they applaud and sip their scotch.” Which, yeah, I get how strange and humiliating that must feel, but if you’re a poet with a sizable audience, then let me play you the world’s smallest violin.
But Akbar continually wins my sympathy back. And he is aware of how he may appear to unsympathetic readers: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry./ This may be me at my best.” The voices in his poems are charming and heartbreaking, and the imagery is awesome. Here are some of my favorite lines and moments from this collection:
“a crimson robe floating/ up from the Gobi/ sand into prophet then back into sand”
“envy is the only deadly sin that’s no fun/ for the sinner”
“We all want/ the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,/ like the first man to hear a parrot speak)”
“You just don’t know yet which parts/ of yourself to value…/ your irises or their mothish obsession/ with light.”
“even our great-grandparents saw different blues owing/ to the rapid evolution of rods and cones”
“Do you know how hard it is to dig a new river?/ To be the single tongue in a sack full of teeth?”
“Mostly I want to be letters—not/ their sounds, but their shapes/ on a page. It must be exhilarating/ to be a symbol for everything at once:/ the bone caught in a child’s windpipe,/ the venom hiding in a snake’s jaw.”
“I pictured myself/ reduced to a warm globe of blood/ and yearned to become a sturdy in my end-/lessness, to grow heavy and terrible/ as molten iron poured down a throat.”
“the stomach/ of the girl who ate only hair was filled with hair they cut/ it out when she died it formed a mold of her stomach reducing/ a life to its most grotesque artifact”
“we now know some angels are more terrifying/ than others our enemies are replaceable the stones behind their teeth/ glow in moonlight”
“there were so many spiders/ your mouth a moonless system/ of caves filling with dust/ the dust thickened to tar/ your mouth opened and tar spilled out”
“Come to bed with me, you honest thing—/ let’s break into science. I’ll pluck you from my mouth/ like an apple seed, weep with you over other people’s lost pets./ The strangeness between us opens like a pinhole on the ocean floor:/ in floods a fishing boat, a Chinese seabird, an entire galaxy/ of starfish. We are learning so much so quickly. The sun/ is dying. The atom is reducible. The god-harnesses/ we thought we came with were just our tiny lungs.”
“Plants reinvent sugar daily/ and hardly anyone applauds.”
“There has been a swarm/ of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,/ I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds/ of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are/ arranging their plans like warms preparing/ to rise through the soil. They are ready to die/ with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.”
“sexless as a comma”
“I’m keyless as the language of twins”
“See how/ I am all rosejuice and wonderdrunk? See how/ my throat is filling with salt? Boil me. Divide/ me. Wrap me in paper and return me to earth. One day/ I will crack open underneath the field mushrooms./ One day I will wake up in someone else’s bones.”
“in Islam there are prayers to return almost anything even/ prayers to return faith I have been going through book after book pushing/ the sounds through my teeth I will keep making these noises/ as long as deemed necessary until there is nothing left of me to forgive”
So yes, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a remarkable, gorgeous collection of contemporary poetry by a poet I can’t help liking, even if the voices he cultivates wear on me a little bit at times. Indeed, the voices in these poems can get exasperating, but the moments of raw beauty more than make up for that.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism
Eloquently beautiful and haunting.
The writer's journey through addiction and recovery, Islamic religion, his family, and his lovers.
Some of my favorite phrases:
"Like the marble angel who woke to find his innards scattered around his feet. Blood from the belly tastes sweeter than blood anywhere else."
"Sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying like a feather on an arrow shot though a neck other times I feel tasked only with my own soreness like a scab on the roof of a mouth."
"Undertaker spills his midday latte on a corpse, a chariot wheel flies off and kills a slave, and nobody asks for a refund."
"Are you going to finish that tongue, my love? I'll chew it up for you, spit it down your throat."
"Keep a soul open and it's bound to fill up with scum. It's all I can do to quiver in and out of my jeans each day, to keep my fingers out of the wrong mouths."
The writer's journey through addiction and recovery, Islamic religion, his family, and his lovers.
Some of my favorite phrases:
"Like the marble angel who woke to find his innards scattered around his feet. Blood from the belly tastes sweeter than blood anywhere else."
"Sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying like a feather on an arrow shot though a neck other times I feel tasked only with my own soreness like a scab on the roof of a mouth."
"Undertaker spills his midday latte on a corpse, a chariot wheel flies off and kills a slave, and nobody asks for a refund."
"Are you going to finish that tongue, my love? I'll chew it up for you, spit it down your throat."
"Keep a soul open and it's bound to fill up with scum. It's all I can do to quiver in and out of my jeans each day, to keep my fingers out of the wrong mouths."
Favorite extracts:
"Most days I try to act human, to breathe like a human and speak with the same flat language, but often my kindness is clumsy—I stop a stranger to tie his shoe and end up kissing his knees"
"God loves the hungry more than the full"
"Paradise lies at the feet of mothers I will believe your dreams please mother kiss all my secret rashes I am awake and will be"
"Most days I try to act human, to breathe like a human and speak with the same flat language, but often my kindness is clumsy—I stop a stranger to tie his shoe and end up kissing his knees"
"God loves the hungry more than the full"
"Paradise lies at the feet of mothers I will believe your dreams please mother kiss all my secret rashes I am awake and will be"
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Lyrical and captivating, the imagery really did it for me.
I don’t read much poetry. I read perhaps 1 or 2 collections a year. This one was recommended to me late last year. The poet is an Iranian-American and the main focus of this collection is battling with addiction/alcoholism.