RaveSouthern Humanities ReviewTo read Kaveh Akbar’s debut full-length collection, Calling A Wolf A Wolf, is to see a human turned inside out, body and soul, rendered skillfully on every page. Akbar’s poetry deftly navigates the complicated subjects of religion, addiction, and loss—of the body’s health, of self, of faith—and the complex joy and wonder at their being found again, if they can be found at all. These poems are seekers in themselves, journeying through alcoholism and recovery, faith and faithlessness, scrubbing unabashedly at the fogged window of the self ... This is how we arrive at Akbar’s work: the truth of them often unbeautiful, often raw with the strange griefs of if and want and need, and us readers serving as the child; the poems a kind of tragedy, offered to us with Akbar’s careful elegance ... Kaveh Akbar’s stunning collection strikes at the heart of the writer as well as the reader, rendering feeling and faith (the most ancient of dilemmas) on the page with wonder, delight, and pain.
Fatimah Asghar
RaveThe Adroit JournalThe experience of reading Fatimah Asghar’s debut book of poems, If They Come For Us, is one of being gripped by the shoulders and shaken awake; of having your eyelids pinned open and unable to blink. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. The speaker of these poems appears at once old and incredibly new, a dichotomy that is upheld as the narrative jumps from past to present and all over the last century. And yet, even when we’re told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speaker’s, they still are, somehow ... In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound and—hopefully—learn from it.
