Calling a Wolf a Wolf
by Kaveh Akbar
Buy on AmazonWhat happens to desire left alone? Can it exist unattended? Will it mutate, grow fangs and claws? In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Akbar’s poetry orbits carefully around the notion that to exist is to live in a state of permanent psychic yearning – for love and lust, for faith, for sin, for alcohol. As jewel-fires of desire smoke across tender and incantatory verse, we’re left with a story of addiction and recovery that points us in the direction of absolution.
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"What happens to desire left alone? Can it exist unattended? Will it mutate, grow fangs and claws? In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Akbar’s poetry orbits carefully around the notion that to exist is to live in a state of permanent psychic yearning – for love and lust, for faith, for sin, for alcohol. As jewel-fires of desire smoke across tender and incantatory verse, we’re left with a story of addiction and recovery that points us in the direction of absolution."
NPR Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org
"Kaveh Akbar's poems in Calling a Wolf a Wolf are about drinking and stopping drinking, and darkness... and also ultimately about delight -- and they are so weird and wry about it all."
By the Book: Leslie Jamison · nytimes.com
"Calling a Wolf a Wolf, by Kaveh Akbar. Akbar alchemizes pain into beauty line after line, but it was an unexpected evocation of hope that made me cry."
By the Book: Tess Gunty · nytimes.com