Kaveh 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.

A number of poets over the years have made alcoholism a major subject ... But few have written...with as much beauty or generosity as Kaveh Akbar. 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 ... each [poem] offers a complex picture of addiction, full of acute and often unsparing observations about its psychology ... Akbar is a sumptuous, remarkably painterly poet. But his style is often more expressionist or surrealist than realist or scenic ... 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 ... there’s deep sadness and longing but also gentleness in the back-and-forth here, even a sense of play. Akbar’s replies make their own kind of sense. Even if words fail us, even if they can’t alone solve our problems, they can name their own inadequacy, gain new uses, and maybe, when artfully arranged, even offer what Akbar says we 'all want,' that thing we might name poetry—'to walk in sincere wonder, / like the first man to hear a parrot speak.'

There is something gritty that catches in your teeth when you read Akbar’s work, sharp-edged words that when linked together suddenly slip off your tongue. His poems are ordered streams of chaos; they try to contain innumerable ideas but are reined in by uniform lines and in-line rhyme ... Every time I read Calling a Wolf a Wolf it pulls me in deeper, demonstrating to me that humanity is by nature subject to vice, sin, recovery, relapse, etc. A book that seems so specific in scope broadens itself to the close reader, who might see in a self-portrait their own reflection ... If the confessional styles of modern poets Jericho Brown and Rachel Mennies are anathema to you, this book is unlikely to please you, but if you enjoy seeing yourself in the trials and tribulations of another, Akbar is likely to delight ... There are so many other dichotomies and queries that Akbar deconstructs ... To read the book all at once is to hold a sustained and purposefully painful conversation that is ultimately enlightening at its close.

Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf offers various artist portraits of its own, exploring this ground with candor and lyricism, traversing time, culture, and language to create a poetic topography that is both familiar and unexpected ... There’s a suggestion of a reversal of Dante’s Inferno whereby Akbar starts with the dismantling of the self, through a rebirth of mortal desires and delights and, ultimately, a nascent grace. Yet ruminations on the experience of and emergence from addiction are only one layer of these poems. The book strips the self of its protective covering and in so doing gets to the core of what it is to love, grieve, embrace joy, inflict pain, and seek redemption ... Akbar’s poems question the very nature of a self-portrait: can it ever impartially reflect its creator? ... Poets who are bicultural often touch on displacement and exile, but language—and its limitations—is at the heart of many of these poems. What language do we employ when we are speechless with loss? How do we reconcile our heritage, our desires and shames, the disparate pieces that make up an individual? Akbar’s response is to employ a lasered inward eye to refine and strengthen the foundation of the outward ... The poet pulls back the veil on the illusion that his words are always illuminating or truthful. Ironically, with the turn of that curtain—both poetically and personally—Akbar the poet offers an intimacy the speaker is incapable of ... Akbar uses language as both entreaty and absolution.

One senses that Akbar’s journey to sobriety is a sort of out-of-body experience in which he must somehow reclaim ownership of his own corporality to truly heal. Still, the process is ongoing and always undoing itself, as he alternately embraces and dismisses his physical reality. As the poems stretch onward, the reader senses that Akbar’s vacillating disassociations are much more than symptoms of his disease. As he continues to step out of himself to view himself as Other, he discovers who he wants to become. It seems that by observing himself from the viewpoint of a bystander he escapes the fear of self that is intrinsic to his addiction. At the same time, he contrasts this depersonalization with an oddly tender personification of addiction. He recalls with bittersweet nostalgia memories in which addiction appears as another person, one with whom he feels a sort of camaraderie ... Even the pace of the collection is both unpredictable and rhythmically pleasing; it deftly alternates between racing descriptions and slow epiphanies. Its rhythm feels vaguely nostalgic for the way it echoes the peaks and valleys of one’s own experience with suffering ... he demonstrates with otherworldly imagery that those who suffer possess an astonishing sensitivity to beauty, able to find it in even the saddest places. Indeed, Calling a Wolf a Wolf does precisely that.

To 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.

Akbar’s poems acquaint us with his speaker’s plural selves—as an immigrant, alcoholic, man, child, son, lover, and artist. But their almost obsessive meditation on how language creates the self and vice versa unites them ... The first section of the collection presents a world so vast and new that the temptation to name nearly overwhelms the speaker. I am struck most by the intensity and purity of his pleasure, as though he were witnessing everything for the first time ... Ultimately, redemption lies not within language, prayer, or the past, but in the speaker himself ... the speaker reaffirms his belief in God and the world, which holds a magical beauty he cannot deny

Though loss infuses the Divedapper founder and editor’s work, he animates myriad human struggles—addiction, estrangement from one’s body and language, faith and its absence—with empathy, intimacy, and expansive vision ... A breathtaking addition to the canon of addiction literature, Akbar’s poetry confronts the pain and joy in denying oneself for the sake of oneself.