Even if words fail us, even if they can’t alone solve our problems, they can name their own inadequacy, gain new uses, and maybe, when artfully arranged, even offer what Akbar says we 'all want,' that thing we might name poetry-'to walk in sincere wonder, / like the first man to hear a parrot speak.' Read Full Review > Akbar’s replies make their own kind of sense. there’s deep sadness and longing but also gentleness in the back-and-forth here, even a sense of play. Sometimes Calling a Wolf a Wolf is oblique because Akbar is struggling with the problem of performativity, working to invent a more personal language for his experience. But his style is often more expressionist or surrealist than realist or scenic. Akbar is a sumptuous, remarkably painterly poet. each offers a complex picture of addiction, full of acute and often unsparing observations about its psychology. His debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, out this past fall from Alice James, is about addiction and its particularities but also touches something larger and harder to point to, to talk about-existential emptiness and the ways substances often offer respite from our spiritual hunger. But few have written.with as much beauty or generosity as Kaveh Akbar. A number of poets over the years have made alcoholism a major subject.
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