Calling a Wolf a Wolf

"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."

"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."

"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."