RaveThe Georgia ReviewKaveh Akbar’s debut poetry collection,Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is about the essential consequences of incarnation, is a sensory catalog of wounds and wonders, vices and pleasures. His poems—fragmented, plaintive, at points frantic—are occupied with what it means to be a spirit and a mind haunted by their physical baggage and delighted by their physical inheritance ... The central pivot of Calling a Wolf a Wolf is in the conflict between the piss and filth and loss that come from being a part of physical creation and the poet’s higher role of naming, which requires recognition and is a form of creation itself. The dread and delight that permeate this tension yield an irreducible complexity of language, a tangled knot of expression that leaves Akbar’s poems scattered and fragmented, but always precise in their expressed feeling ... Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a remarkable debut.
Kai Carlson-Wee
PositiveThe Collagist\"Beneath the thick cloud of depression, and within the empty pursuits of late capitalism, the tangible solidity of the train—its predictability and pragmatism, its incontrovertible physics –provides something for Carlson-Wee to anchor himself to as it rumbles across the prairie ... Kai Carlson-Wee is himself no lighter for having ridden the weight of a freight train, but those days and nights rolling on the broken backs of America\'s rustiest metaphor for its own failed dreams perhaps allows him to release himself, however briefly, from the spiritual consequences of mortality.\
Sean Thomas Dougherty
RaveThe Sunlight PressTraced throughout The Second O of Sorrow are Dougherty’s devastating reflections on his wife’s illness. Alternating between beautiful odes to love and grim observations on what it means to be fighting for life in this country, these poems are their own sort of metaphor for the Rust Belt ... In the midst of his grief and anxiety, Dougherty puts forward expressions of startling beauty ... Work and pool hall laughter, love and the horror of death and loss. Dougherty lays it all out in this collection, and he does so on the tarnished and diveted table of Ohio.
