Pilgrim Bell
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Kaveh Akbar’s exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf
With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance—the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation—teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.
Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives—resonant, revelatory, and holy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rich and moving collection, Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf) writes poems of contradiction and ambivalence centered on religious belief and ethnic and national identity. Evocative and polyphonic, surprising but never artificially shocking, Akbar's poems flit from the divine to the corporeal in the same breath. In "Vines": "when I saw God/ I trembled like a man"—and a few lines later, "I live like a widow// every day a heave of knitting patterns and sex toys." In "The Miracle," the poet confesses to himself: "Gabriel isn't coming for you. If he did/ would you call him Jibril, or Gabriel like you/ are here? Who is this even for?" Within that question lies a tension between cultures, religions, loyalties, and ways of being in and looking at the world. As an Iranian-born American, Akbar does not feel that either of these nationalities can fully encompass his identity. "Some nights I force/ my brain to dream me/ Persian by listening/ to old home movies/ as I fall asleep," he explains. This impressive, thoughtful work shimmers with inventive syntax and spiritual profundity.
