‘Alcohol dependency, the hunger for answers, the wish to know God, the erotic: these desires are all, for Akbar, analogous, though never identical. Each can overflow, each can reach excess, and that excess becomes by turns magnificent and ridiculous and dangerous … Akbar has what every poet needs: the power to make, from emotions that others have felt, memorable language that nobody has assembled before’
Steph Burt, Yale Review
‘Though loss infuses [Kaveh Akbar’s] work, he animates myriad human struggles – addiction, estrangement from one’s body and language, faith and its absence – with empathy, intimacy, and expansive vision … A breathtaking addition to the canon of addiction literature … Akbar’s poems offer readers, religious or not, a way to cultivate faith in times of deepest fear’
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘An outstanding book of poetry. I was particularly impressed by the imagery and deftness with language … every poem offers something compelling or strange or unknowable and always beautiful’
Roxane Gay
‘I love a poet who can talk of the stars and soot, who brings God to the ground without losing a burning sense of awe … How necessary and refreshing to see a poet truly wrestle with tradition … [Calling a Wolf a Wolf is] a gorgeous debut collection’
Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
‘Akbar proves what books can do in his exceptional debut, which brings us along on his struggle with addiction … His work stands out among literature on the subject for a refreshingly unshowy honesty; Akbar runs full tilt emotionally but is never self-indulgent … an electric current runs through the collection that keeps reader and writer going … an important new poet’
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review)
‘Calling a Wolf a Wolf tackles addiction, alcoholism, recovery, sobriety, and faith with brazen, intimate honesty … heartfelt and vulnerable … a stunning debut’
Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed
‘It’s rare for Iranian-American writers like Akbar and I to gracefully move past the tricky task of introducing and explaining our cultures (plural, as “Iranian” is about as diverse as “American”) … [In] Calling a Wolf a Wolf, more than any other lens of identity, the alcoholic steps into the spotlight. But the genius is his allowing all the many cultures that are contained and challenged within the identifier of addict to play well together. In this way gender, sexuality, ethnicity even, are subverted, bypassed, and somehow also honoured … John Berryman and James Wright haunt Calling a Wolf a Wolf, but Akbar also has a voice so distinctly his – tinted in old Persian, dipped in modern American, ancient and millennial, addict and ascetic, animal and more animal’
Porochista Khakpour, VQR
‘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 Calling a Wolf a Wolf’
Fanny Howe
‘Akbar has crafted one of the best debuts in recent memory’
Eduardo C. Corral
‘An intensely inventive and original debut’
Frank Bidart
‘[A] stunning debut’
francine j. harris
‘Truly brilliant’
John Green
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in the United States of America by Alice James Books 2017
This edition first published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © Kaveh Akbar, 2017
All rights reserved
Cover design: Jim Stoddart
ISBN: 978-0-141-98798-9
Soot
I. TERMINAL
Wild Pear Tree
Do You Speak Persian?
Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood
Portrait of the Alcoholic with Home Invader and Housefly
Recovery
Drinkaware Self-Report
Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal
Some Boys aren’t Born They Bubble
Heritage
Milk
Portrait of the Alcoholic with Doubt and Kingfisher
Desunt Nonnulla
Learning to Pray
Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober
Supplication with Rabbit Skull and Bouquet
Exciting the Canvas
A Boy Steps into the Water
Wake Me Up When It’s My Birthday
II. HUNGER
What Seems Like Joy
Best Shadows
Portrait of the Alcoholic with Moths and River
Rimrock
Prayer
Besides, Little Goat, You Can’t Just Go Asking for Mercy
Thirstiness is not Equal Division
Long Pig
Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler
Against Dying
Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy
Orchids are Sprouting from the Floorboards
The New World
Against Hell
Palmyra
Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives
Portrait of the Alcoholic Frozen in Block of Ice
Neither Now Nor Never
Everything That Moves is Alive and a Threat – A Reminder
What Use is Knowing Anything If No One is Around
No is a Complete Sentence
III. IRONS
Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus
An Apology
The Straw is Too Long, the Axe is Too Dull
My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare
Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game
Tassiopeia
Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving
Fugu
River of Milk
God
Despite Their Size Children are Easy to Remember They Watch You
Ways to Harm a Thing
Personal Inventory: Fearless (Temporis Fila)
So Often the Body Becomes a Distraction
I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude
Portrait of the Alcoholic Stranded Alone on a Desert Island
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
for Dan
Deep abiding gratitude to Chris Forhan, Alessandra Lynch, Steve Henn, David J. Thompson, Carey Salerno, Bryan Borland, Seth Pennington, Don Share, francine j. harris, Eduardo C. Corral, Frank Bidart, Fanny Howe, Max Ritvo, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Arash Saedinia, Ruth Baumann, James Kimbrell, David Kirby, Jayme Ringleb, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Martha Rhodes, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Butler, Solmaz Sharif, Yona Harvey, Kazim Ali, Nick Flynn, Jonathan Farmer, Sean Shearer, Gretchen Marquette, David Tomas Martinez, Zack Strait, Allison Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Andrew Epstein, Damian Caudill, Chase Noelle, Carl Phillips, Alyssa Graffam, Darrian Church, Julia Bouwsma, Tomaž Šalamun, Michael Purol, Thaddeus Harmon, Wanda, Mammy, Arash, Mytoan, Nora, and Layla for their patience and love and support.
My thanks to Franz Wright, Reyhaneh Jabbari, W. H. Auden, Ali Akbar Sadeghi, Khaled al-Asaad, Carolus Linnæus, Aaron Weiss, Heather Christle, Fanny Howe, Sohrab Sepehri, Lydia Henn, Leslie Jamison, Diane Seuss, Gertrude Stein, Kahlil Gibran, Max Ritvo, Dan Barden, and all other voices in the choir.
An eternity of wild love and gratitude to Paige Lewis, who all this is meant to impress.
Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust,
chewing away a chain link fence or mariner’s knife.
From up so close we must seem
clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers
undressing in front of each other
for the first time. Regarding loss, I’m afraid
to keep it in the story,
worried what I might bring back to life,
like the marble angel who woke to find
his innards scattered around his feet.
Blood from the belly tastes sweeter
than blood from anywhere else. We know this
but don’t know why – the woman on TV
dabs a man’s gutwound with her hijab
then draws the cloth to her lips, confused.
I keep dreaming I’m a creature pulling out my claws
one by one to sell in a market stall next to stacks
of pomegranates and garden tools. It’s predictable,
the logic of dreams. Long ago I lived in Heaven
because I wanted to. When I fell to earth
I knew the way – through the soot, into the leaves.
It still took years. Upon landing, the ground
embraced me sadly, with the gentleness
of someone delivering tragic news to a child.
‘All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.’
– W. H. Auden