A stunning volume of poems.

From the little I know of Kaveh Akbar’s biography, he has struggled with alcoholism, and nearly all of these poems reflect that and reflect the tensions between his Iranian heritage and American identity. Subjects like alcoholism and immigrant identity are well-worn and risk becoming…boring.

The same is true of the way Akbar weaves these subjects into his success as a poet. At one point the speaker describes himself “rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers/ while they applaud and sip their scotch.” Which, yeah, I get how strange and humiliating that must feel, but if you’re a poet with a sizable audience, then let me play you the world’s smallest violin.

But Akbar continually wins my sympathy back. And he is aware of how he may appear to unsympathetic readers: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry./ This may be me at my best.” The voices in his poems are charming and heartbreaking, and the imagery is awesome. Here are some of my favorite lines and moments from this collection:

“a crimson robe floating/ up from the Gobi/ sand into prophet then back into sand”

“envy is the only deadly sin that’s no fun/ for the sinner”

“We all want/ the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,/ like the first man to hear a parrot speak)”

“You just don’t know yet which parts/ of yourself to value…/ your irises or their mothish obsession/ with light.”

“even our great-grandparents saw different blues owing/ to the rapid evolution of rods and cones”

“Do you know how hard it is to dig a new river?/ To be the single tongue in a sack full of teeth?”

“Mostly I want to be letters—not/ their sounds, but their shapes/ on a page. It must be exhilarating/ to be a symbol for everything at once:/ the bone caught in a child’s windpipe,/ the venom hiding in a snake’s jaw.”

“I pictured myself/ reduced to a warm globe of blood/ and yearned to become a sturdy in my end-/lessness, to grow heavy and terrible/ as molten iron poured down a throat.”

“the stomach/ of the girl who ate only hair was filled with hair they cut/ it out when she died it formed a mold of her stomach reducing/ a life to its most grotesque artifact”

“we now know some angels are more terrifying/ than others our enemies are replaceable the stones behind their teeth/ glow in moonlight”

“there were so many spiders/ your mouth a moonless system/ of caves filling with dust/ the dust thickened to tar/ your mouth opened and tar spilled out”

“Come to bed with me, you honest thing—/ let’s break into science. I’ll pluck you from my mouth/ like an apple seed, weep with you over other people’s lost pets./ The strangeness between us opens like a pinhole on the ocean floor:/ in floods a fishing boat, a Chinese seabird, an entire galaxy/ of starfish. We are learning so much so quickly. The sun/ is dying. The atom is reducible. The god-harnesses/ we thought we came with were just our tiny lungs.”

“Plants reinvent sugar daily/ and hardly anyone applauds.”

“There has been a swarm/ of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,/ I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds/ of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are/ arranging their plans like warms preparing/ to rise through the soil. They are ready to die/ with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.”

“sexless as a comma”

“I’m keyless as the language of twins”

“See how/ I am all rosejuice and wonderdrunk? See how/ my throat is filling with salt? Boil me. Divide/ me. Wrap me in paper and return me to earth. One day/ I will crack open underneath the field mushrooms./ One day I will wake up in someone else’s bones.”

“in Islam there are prayers to return almost anything even/ prayers to return faith I have been going through book after book pushing/ the sounds through my teeth I will keep making these noises/ as long as deemed necessary until there is nothing left of me to forgive”

So yes, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a remarkable, gorgeous collection of contemporary poetry by a poet I can’t help liking, even if the voices he cultivates wear on me a little bit at times. Indeed, the voices in these poems can get exasperating, but the moments of raw beauty more than make up for that.