Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry). 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, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.
Praise for Calling a Wolf a Wolf:
"Mr. Akbar's poems give language and form to many experiences I
thought too abstract for expression. They are at once deeply
personal and about all of us."
--John Green, The Wall Street Journal
"...Akbar proves what books can do in his exceptional debut, which
brings us along on his struggle with addiction, a dangerous comfort
and soul-eating monster he addresses boldly..."
--Library Journal, STARRED review
"[Calling a Wolf a Wolf] strips the self of its protective covering
and in so doing gets to the core of what it is to love, grieve,
embrace joy, inflict pain, and seek redemption."
--Jacket 2
"At times conversational, at times oratorical, Akbar seems to
understand that he is moving through the intimate and the cosmic
with the same lingering eye for detail."
--Angel City Review
"[Calling a Wolf a Wolf] is a welcome testimony to how the deeply
personal can seep into and even shape our national consciousness.
This is the work of great poetry."
--Seattle Review of Books
"[Calling a Wolf a Wolf] is a book that whispers, that longs for
connection..."
--Rain Taxi Review of Books
"These are meditations on life as viewed through the
color-saturated prism of a self-admitted alcoholic-addict, who
finds beauty in even the ugliest of experiences."
--VOGUE
"...Akbar is a sumptuous, remarkably painterly poet."
--Benjamin Voight, The Kenyon Review
"Akbar's poems--which explore addiction and arrested development
and the starts and stops of desire--are psychic travelogues that
are tiny and expansive at once."
--The Atlantic Magazine
"Particularly in this time where addiction is destroying whole
communities of people, especially youth communities, Akbar's
collection provides a beacon through a nightmare, and a salve for
the wounded."
--Fork & Page
"In [Akbar's] speaker's voice, language is held in tension, and the
blend of familiar and strange imagery strikes emotional high notes
again and again."
--Stirring Lit
"[Calling a Wolf a Wolf] is not a book asking for forgiveness, but
rather a book about the slow and complicated process of forgiving
and being forgiven."
--Drizzle Review
"Akbar writes with frank and necessary transparency about the
nature of addiction, the ball-and-chain drag of it, the strange and
painful want for the shackle the speaker is simultaneously working
so hard to unclasp."
--Southern Humanities Review
"Akbar's alchemy of remembering and forgetting maps a roving, rich,
and sometimes violent search for self."
--Boston Review
"[Akbar] demonstrates with otherworldly imagery that those who
suffer possess an astonishing sensitivity to beauty, able to find
it in even the saddest places. Indeed, Calling a Wolf a Wolf does
precisely that."
--Fields Magazine
"With electric tempo, Calling a Wolf a Wolf moves swiftly to
execute awesome feats of language, leaving our perception of the
world marvelously warped in its wake."
--Guernica
"The body becomes more than mystical in [Calling a Wolf a Wolf], as
the boundaries between flesh and world are not merely blurred, but
shattered--bodies are thrown upon all the sharp crooked edges of
life and Akbar diligently records every detail of the aftermath. .
."
--Frontier Poetry
"With Kaveh Akbar's Calling a Wolf a Wolf, we are not only
witnessing the rise of a prominent contemporary poet, but we are
also challenged to relook at the way we respond to the emotional
obstacles faced by ourselves and others."
--The Coil
"Akbar's poems are liminal rides, earnest and authentic
considerations of what it truly means to exist in this world."
--The Millions
"Kaveh Akbar's highly-anticipated debut is bold and deeply
personal. He takes us on a journey through his mind, confronting
addiction, battling alcoholism, fighting for control, and keeping
the course on the road to recovery."
--Hello Giggles
"Here, 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 honored."
--VQR Online
"This debut collection 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."
--The Rumpus
"Akbar has what every poet needs: the power to make, from emotions
that others have felt, memorable language that nobody has assembled
before."
--Stephanie Burt, The Yale Review
"John Berryman and James Wright (and his son Franz 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. In the end,
nothing brings man--human or man--down to Earth more than the
kingdom of flora and fauna."
--Porochista Khakpour, Virginia Quarterly Review
"Kaveh Akbar has evolved a poetics that (often) suggests the
infinite within each object, gesture, event. The smallest thing in
these poems pushes one up against something intractable and
profound. Surface and depth constantly turn into each other.
Narrative, the dilemmas of personal history and anguish are handled
with equal sophistication. 'Odd, for an apocalypse to announce
itself with such bounty.' This is bounty, an intensely inventive
and original debut."
--Frank Bidart, author of Metaphysical Dog and Watching the Spring
Festival
"In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar exquisitely and tenaciously
braids astonishment and atonement into a singular lyric voice. The
desolation of alcoholism widens into hard-won insight: 'the body is
a mosque borrowed from Heaven.' Doubt and fear spiral into grace
and beauty. Akbar's mind, like his language, is perpetually in
motion. His imagery--wounded and resplendent--is masterful and his
syntax ensnares and releases music that's both delicate and
muscular. Kaveh Akbar has crafted one of the best debuts in recent
memory. In his hands, awe and redemption hinge into unforgettable
and gorgeous poems."
--Eduardo C. Corral
"You can open this stunning debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, anywhere
and find the critical tenderness that permeates Kaveh Akbar's work.
The work here means to go out on limbs, be it to fling blossoms,
chew fireflies, or to push old nests into the river once the
rearing is done. There is an engagement here with faith that
extends beyond religion. . . . The poems have as much audacity as
humility, a rare mix of openness in a time of flinching
anxiety."
--francine j. harris "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
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