Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
Alice James Books, 2017
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. These are poems of pain, of shame, but also of the wisdom that comes from these experiences. “Keep a soul open,” he writes, “and it’s bound to fill up with scum.”
About half of these poems appeared earlier this year in the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press). When I reviewed it for New Plains Review, the new president’s Muslim-targeting travel bans were fresh in the public consciousness. 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. Populist hostility means modern poetry needs othered voices more than ever, but Kaveh Akbar’s cultural Islam is just that. He’s unsure of what God means to him as an American born in Iran. In “Learning to Pray,” a boy emulates his father spread on a janamaz, noting the occasional smile in admiration at the child’s imitation. Akbar’s religious focus remains patriarchal, but it is not Allah with which he identifies, but his actual father. “Against Hell” conveys exactly what the title implies, interrogating the very idea of damnation as a choice prevalent in Abrahamic faith. “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.
Speaking of desire, the poems from the chapbook are frequently titled “Portrait of the Alcoholic with/on _______.” These portraits often read more like landscapes, showcasing the varied trajectories of a single individual who is lost and looking for home. In “Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus,” location is everything. Space is not a vast open range but a dark cave of self-loathing where the Alcoholic is sometimes content to beg outsiders to join him because outside they will only falter. The Alcoholic muses on what kind of eulogy his brother might give if he dies:
…he will tell
his daughter I was better than I was he will leave out
my crueldrunk nights the wet mattresses my driving alone
into cornfields unsure whether I’d drive out.
As this desperate, charged passage suggests, the alcoholism that pervades these poems is often surreal but mostly just plain real. For our struggling protagonist, recovering from alcoholism is like becoming a person over again. This includes a reckoning of both individual feelings and religio-cultural ones. In “An Apology,” he admits that he is “still learning / the local law: don’t hurt something / that can smile, don’t hold any grief / except your own.” For this world, the Golden Rule is just a local ordinance, but the alternative must be removed: “As a boy I tore out / the one hundred and nine pages / about Hell in my first Qur’an.” Moving forward, he’s willing to admit some past sins, just not willing to accept every past punishment.
Kaveh Akbar also writes the body into landscapes. He has a vast knowledge of human ephemera and a penchant for making articulate observations of our progression as a species. A mammoth skull found in a pumpkin patch is not merely window dressing for the subjects at large; it carries a message about recycling, of reframing our little worlds as built on a grander, forgotten history. When he observes that, “Some people born before the Model T / lived to see a man walk on the moon,” he marvels at the variance a single lifetime can see. For all the implicit wisdom of these wistful observations, readers never lose sight of who is providing this information: a young man struggling with overcoming addiction. Readers of poetry frequently reduce ill-fated poets to caricatures of tragic heroism (i. e. Berryman, Plath, Sexton), but real pain encompasses only a fraction of a real individual. The Alcoholic sometimes speaks wisdom because sometimes an alcoholic can be wise. The Alcoholic sometimes pines for lovers because alcohol does not monopolize their passion. The willful resistance of Kaveh Akbar’s Alcoholic persona rejects victimhood without denigrating victims, empowers the struggling without fetishizing them.
…Sometimes you just have to leave
whatever’s real to you, you have to clomp
through fields and kick the caps off
all the toadstools.
Kaveh Akbar does not get much credit for his humor, yet it plays a major role in many poems. Readers expecting a one-dimensional look at sorrow or illness will be met with poems that never lose sight of simple joy amidst pain. Passages such as “A garden bucket filled with cream / would disappear, and seconds later I’d emerge / patting my belly” are oddly playful in the otherwise ethereal despair of the Alcoholic’s transitional journey.
Seth Copeland is the founding editor of petrichor. His poetic works have appeared in Menacing Hedge, Crab Fat, Otoliths, San Pedro River Review, Mannequin Haus, and others. He teaches English at the University of Central Oklahoma.