“It’s only natural to smell / smoke and feel hungry, to lean into the confusion of tongues.” Desire is human, it is here now, begging for touch or taste, whereas the spiritual punishments for hedonism are too often nebulous other worlds.

“Against Hell” conveys exactly what the title implies, interrogating the very idea of damnation as a choice prevalent in Abrahamic faith. Akbar’s religious focus remains patriarchal, but it is not Allah with which he identifies, but his actual father. In “Learning to Pray,” a boy emulates his father spread on a janamaz, noting the occasional smile in admiration at the child’s imitation. He’s unsure of what God means to him as an American born in Iran.

Populist hostility means modern poetry needs othered voices more than ever, but Kaveh Akbar’s cultural Islam is just that. I read the election into Kaveh’s lines-the elegant Islam that curls around his poems is phantom, tangential, often peripheral to pain and desire. When I reviewed it for New Plains Review, the new president’s Muslim-targeting travel bans were fresh in the public consciousness. “Keep a soul open,” he writes, “and it’s bound to fill up with scum.”Ībout half of these poems appeared earlier this year in the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press). These are poems of pain, of shame, but also of the wisdom that comes from these experiences. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives-resonant, revelatory, and holy.In his first full-length poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar sees the capacity for all sheep to be wolves, having first learned his own howl. Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “ what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance-the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation-teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness. With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed.

Kaveh akbar calling a wolf a wolf