Into cornfields unsure whether I’d drive out.Īs this desperate, charged passage suggests, the alcoholism that pervades these poems is often surreal but mostly just plain real.
My crueldrunk nights the wet mattresses my driving alone His daughter I was better than I was he will leave out The Alcoholic muses on what kind of eulogy his brother might give if he dies: Space is not a vast open range but a dark cave of self-loathing where the Alcoholic is sometimes content to beg outsiders to join him because outside they will only falter.
In “Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus,” location is everything. Speaking of desire, the poems from the chapbook are frequently titled “Portrait of the Alcoholic with/on _.” These portraits often read more like landscapes, showcasing the varied trajectories of a single individual who is lost and looking for home. “It’s only natural to smell / smoke and feel hungry, to lean into the confusion of tongues.” Desire is human, it is here now, begging for touch or taste, whereas the spiritual punishments for hedonism are too often nebulous other worlds. “Against Hell” conveys exactly what the title implies, interrogating the very idea of damnation as a choice prevalent in Abrahamic faith. Akbar’s religious focus remains patriarchal, but it is not Allah with which he identifies, but his actual father. In “Learning to Pray,” a boy emulates his father spread on a janamaz, noting the occasional smile in admiration at the child’s imitation. He’s unsure of what God means to him as an American born in Iran. Populist hostility means modern poetry needs othered voices more than ever, but Kaveh Akbar’s cultural Islam is just that. I read the election into Kaveh’s lines-the elegant Islam that curls around his poems is phantom, tangential, often peripheral to pain and desire. When I reviewed it for New Plains Review, the new president’s Muslim-targeting travel bans were fresh in the public consciousness. “Keep a soul open,” he writes, “and it’s bound to fill up with scum.”Ībout half of these poems appeared earlier this year in the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press). These are poems of pain, of shame, but also of the wisdom that comes from these experiences. In his first full-length poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar sees the capacity for all sheep to be wolves, having first learned his own howl.
0 kommentar(er)
