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4.0 

Calling a Wolf a Wolf

By Kaveh Akbar
Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

"The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." --Fanny Howe

This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

From "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before"
 
      Sometimes you just have to leave

whatever's real to you, you have to clomp

through fields and kick the caps off

all the toadstools. Sometimes

you have to march all the way to Galilee
 

or the literal foot of God himself before you realize

you've already passed the place where

you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember

the being afraid, only that it came to an end.
 
 

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.

 

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287 Reviews

4.0
“Found out about this book because of one of John Green’s videos on the Vlogbrothers channel. It lured me because of a line he mentioned. As I read this, I try to figure out a person I don’t know. Try to understand a language I don’t understand — or not fluent as much. But in the words that I can read, the words that I can connect, I can feel the pain. The sadness. Those glimpses I saw, understood - or try to from my own point of view.”

About Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry). The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.

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