Of joy paleontologist tarpaper marshmallow I polished them like trophiesĮager in delight and color-blind though I still loved crayonsįor their names cerulean gunmetal and corn-įlower more than making up for the hues I couldn’t tell apartĮven my dry and desiccated ‘soul’ can remember the ‘tiny seizure’ of joy in the act of reading itself. The names of things each new title a tiny seizure Still unsmogged by its station I walked learning Here, I find a lovely meditation on language:Īs a child I wasn’t so much foreign as I was very small my soul Some of that value emerges in a poem like ‘Desunt Nonnulla’ (Latin for ‘falling short’). To encounter this book along the lines Ebersole draws misses an important part of the value of Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Akbar’s depth of reading, craft, and imagery, coupled with sometimes astonishing metaphors and twists of language do the very important work of poetry in terms of catalysing empathy and revelation without being ‘showy’ and unsexily ‘revealing’ – or, as the poet puts it: ‘the moon unpeels itself without affectation’. Yes, there is much made in this collection about trauma, grime, addiction, sex, and higher powers, and yes, an ungenerous reading might be able to accuse Akbar of self-indulgent, maudlin soul-baring and navel-gazing (Ebersole uses the clinical term ’narcissism’), but in spite of the consistent attention to ‘himself’, I find it difficult to feel the same way as Ebersole does. Even a cursory pass of the book quickly reveals most of the biographical features that hover around Akbar’s name in the press: his Iranian-American status (‘Do you Speak Persian?) his alcoholism (several poems are variations on ‘Portrait of the Alcoholic with…’) piety (the second word of the book is ‘God’) his recovery from alcoholism (most bluntly in the poem entitled ‘Recovery’) – all this and a good dose of meaty, embodied sensuality (we read a lot about blood and mouths and throats) could be read as ‘engulfing’ Akbar’s debut collection.

It’s hard to find a review or blurb of this book that doesn’t mention the poet’s struggles with alcoholism, recovery, religion or sexuality. In a way, Ebersole isn’t wrong: Calling a Wolf a Wolf is certainly all about Akbar.

Even when he’s trying to compliment Akbar’s work, it’s backhanded – as in the opening of his review where we read:ĭumbfoundedly imaginative and self-absorbed, poetry engulfs the reader with so much turbulent rhetoric you’re surprised he’s capable of writing a poem as unwavering as “Learning to Pray” John Ebersole’s late 2017 Tourniquet review of Calling a Wolf a Wolf is harsh.

Kaveh akbar calling a wolf a wolf