RaveWorld Literature TodayPilgrim Bell...is emphatic and honest as it ekes a journey not an ounce less embodied for its emergent spiritual and political edge. Sitting still through Akbar’s poems can be nearly impossible. Better to pace with the more restless verses, where Akbar’s speakers carry the aura of exquisitely shambled tall tales, performing minor miracles of bodily audacity across an unfettered page ... Pillar-like, forcefully end-stopped and majusculated in a style elsewhere alien to Akbar, [the title poems] clobber trails of thought and scatter the scansion, painstakingly reorienting these new poems into spiritual reflections on paradoxes of literacy and tonguelessness, holiness and sacrilege, emptiness and being, knowledge and innocence ... Pilgrim Bell plays with form, association, and recursiveness in bold, vivid patterns, and the threads hold together. Akbar achieves the unique position of being the one poet I never read aloud. Perfect on the page, the voice and personality of each poem are thoroughly, itchingly alive, with an intimacy that, for all its naked self-revelation, feels bound to be engaged in the work of nations.
