BOOK REVIEW

Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf

By Raye Hendrix     DECEMBER 3, 2017
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To read Kaveh Akbar’s debut full-length collection, Calling A Wolf A Wolf, is to see a human turned inside out, body and soul, rendered skillfully on every page. Akbar’s poetry deftly navigates the complicated subjects of religion, addiction, and loss—of the body’s health, of self, of faith—and the complex joy and wonder at their being found again, if they can be found at all. These poems are seekers in themselves, journeying through alcoholism and recovery, faith and faithlessness, scrubbing unabashedly at the fogged window of the self.

In “Soot,” the final poem before the book breaks into sections, Akbar writes, “Upon landing, the ground / embraced me sadly, with the gentleness / of someone delivering tragic news to a child.” This is how we arrive at Akbar’s work: the truth of them often unbeautiful, often raw with the strange griefs of if and want and need, and us readers serving as the child; the poems a kind of tragedy, offered to us with Akbar’s careful elegance.

The concept of that small word, if, lingers like a slow cloud on the horizon, inching ever nearer in the first section of this book, entitled “Terminal.” The language of uncertainty is woven through this section of poems, and that cloud of doubt is large, “weighing as much / as eighty elephants” in “Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Home Invader And Housefly,” the final line heavy with the conditional phrase, “If morning arrives.” Something is building, and we don’t yet know exactly what, but we’re beginning to figure out why. 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. We see this unlocking begin in the poem “Recovery.” It begins as a measured set of instructions: “First, setting down the glass. / Then the knives,” and turns skillfully into a wrenching self-awareness, the speaker admitting freely, “According to science, / I should be dead.” But this ambiguity is large; it contains multitudes. The strangeness of forgetting the original self, the fear that comes with feeling one’s native tongue growing smaller in the mind, is palpable, especially in the poem “Do You Speak Persian?” The speaker laments, “I have been so careless with the words I already have. / I don’t remember how to say home / in my first language, or lonely, or light.” The speaker remembers only the words for “I miss you” (“delam barat tang shodeh”) and “good night” (“shab bekheir”), and these phrases in Persian (Farsi) are echoed throughout the poem, resonating with loss. They appear in response to questions asked of the speaker, though the answers don’t match the inquiries: “How is school going, Kaveh-joon? / Delam barat tang shodeh. / Are you still drinking? / Shab bekheir.” Those same phrases reverberate through the poem’s end, leaving us to grapple with the subtle guilt of forgetting. That same string of want for an identity appears in many of the poems in this section (and the book as a whole), though most loudly in poems like “Learning To Pray,” where the speaker observes his father in prayer and longs “to be so beautiful,” and also in “A Boy Steps Into The Water,” where Akbar writes, “mecca is a moth / chewing holes in a shirt I left / at a lover’s house.”

These questions of identity and the trials of recovery catapult us into the second section, “Hunger.” In the section’s opening poem, “What Seems Like Joy,” Akbar characterizes the following poems with the lines, “I just want to be shaken new like a flag / whipping away its dust.” This section is saturated in glittering detail—jewels, rivers, moths, shadows—things that are hungry for something to cling to, rush towards, or adorn. This hunger for newness, and sometimes the hunger to relapse, is thick and heavy in “Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Moths And River.” Akbar writes, “what you lack and the punishment for your / lacking are the same,” the bleakness of that lack spreading like ink in water through the surrounding poems. It is highly visible, this hunger, even if internal; Akbar navigates through the identities of self-to-self and self-to-God, addiction, recovery, and faith, all of these things bound up wondrously within the subtle self of the poems, and yet somehow still large, explosions of discovery popping from each page with “a throat too elegant for prayer.”

The hunger of these poems bleeds beautifully into the third and final section, “Iron,” with an epigraph by Khalil Gibran: “If love were in the flesh I would burn it out with hot irons and be at peace.” And the final section does just that: it burns. It opens with the poem “Portrait Of The Alcoholic Floating In Space With Severed Umbilicus,” where Akbar writes, “now I regret / every drink I never took,” and goes on to talk about how, in boyhood, the speaker “stole a mint green bra / from a laundromat” and tried it on in secret, behind the backs of his parents. The identity-hunger and complicated regret of post-alcoholism life weigh heavy in the prayers of these poems, the speaker telling God, in “Apology,” that he “meant to be helpless, sex- / less as a comma,” but “charged into desire like a / tiger sprinting off the edge of / the world.”

The confessional takes a subtle but powerful turn in this final section, made more poignant by the preceding poems in “Hunger.” Instead of a straight lamentation of loss, the speaker of these final poems embraces the failures noted in the poems prior, not necessarily as “jewels” but as scars to place the new jewels he’s gathering into, a way of accepting the old self as a part of the new, becoming a whole. It isn’t that this weaving of selves in celebration of the past; there are still moments of despair, regret, of broken-down love (“I finally have answers to the questions I taught / my mother not to ask but now she won’t ask them”), but that love is beginning to heal, and turn inwards, oftentimes even towards the itch of addiction itself. This is best evident in “Portrait Of An Alcoholic With Craving,” in which the speaker has “lost the unspendable coin” that protected him from cravings, but goes on to say that though it keeps him up at night, he doesn’t mind, because “often / the tune is halfway lovely. Besides, if I ask you to leave / you won’t. My hands love you more / than me.” Even in the final poem, the love hurts, but is hopeful: “The boat I am building / will never be done.” No, it won’t ever be finished, but that’s no reason to stop building.

Kaveh Akbar’s stunning collection strikes at the heart of the writer as well as the reader, rendering feeling and faith (the most ancient of dilemmas) on the page with wonder, delight, and pain. This collection doesn’t shy away from casting light onto wounds and scars: instead, it highlights the ugly places and puts them on display, makes them into art, vehicles for precious jewels. There is much for the reader to take from this book, but the main point might be this: “The lesson: It’s never too late to become a new thing.”




RAYE HENDRIX earned her BA and MA in English from Auburn University and is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas in Austin. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Rattle, Southern Indiana Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, Cherry Tree, The Adirondack Review, and elsewhere.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf. By Kaveh Akbar. Alice James Books, 2017.

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