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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