KavehAkbar.com

[kavehakbar]

Frank Bidart (!!!) said this about Calling a Wolf a Wolf (which you can pre-order here): 

"Kaveh Akbar has evolved a poetics that (often) suggests the infinite within each object, gesture, event. The smallest thing in these poems pushes one up against something intractable and profound. Surface and depth constantly turn into each other. Narrative, the dilemmas of personal history and anguish are handled with equal sophistication. 'Odd, for an apocalypse to announce itself with such bounty.' This is bounty, an intensely inventive and original debut." — Frank Bidart

[kavehakbar]

I’ve got new poems out recently in Black Warrior Review, Paris-American, Copper Nickel, At Length, and DIAGRAM. 

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It is a sincere gift to be read well, and this review of my chapbook for the Best American Poetry by Dante Di Stefano is a great, great gift.

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Ploughshares just published a searching, fearless review by Michelle Betters about my chapbook. 

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Very cool thing—a few days ago I posted 20+ poems by poets from nations banned by Trump's immigration block. PBS picked up on it, talked to me a bit, and is hosting some of the poems here for all to read. I hope you can find some time for these voices today.

[kavehakbar]

Very grateful to Mary Szybist for including me in the gorgeous Best New Poets 2016.

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The Georgia Review interviewed me recently, and yesterday someone posted this spiffy little excerpt.

[kavehakbar]

22 Poetry Titles You Might’ve Missed in 2016

2016 was mostly a miserable year for the Earth, but it was a brilliant, bountiful year for poetry. In the glut of major releases, here are some important titles you might’ve missed, in no particular order. 

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francine j harris, play dead “and we were not winter. all dark and thick and full of mouth. // We were not wonder. all dark and thick. our mouths / got us kicked.”

Jos Charles, Safe Space “what chemicals are in ur body / today” 

Tommye Blount, What Are We Not For “I have the tongue / of some endangered animal. No one can understand me.”

Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor “We are a colony of one.”

Zeina Hashem Beck, 3arabi Song “One has to dress / for this earth. You still haven’t seen my wings.”

Marie Ponsot, Collected Poems “We make love and other excuses.”

Tiana Clark, Equilibrium “Took me thirty years to say / I’m glad I don’t pass for white.”

Nicole Sealey, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named “Two of nothing is something, if they’re white.”

Philip Metres, Pictures at an Exhibition “Every empire dies, entering its own dilated eyes”

Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade “How will you spend your courage?”

Jane Wong, Overpour “For certainty, I knock softly / at my fate. For grief, I listen with all my limbs.”

Luis Muñoz translated by Curtis Bauer, From Behind What Landscape “The rocks, much more, / the chestnut trees, plenty. / The rushes, the wasps, / much less.”

Carolina Ebeid, You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior “what is this art if not the hunt / for meat, the animal lanced / & hauled across the tundra”

Fanny Howe, The Needle’s Eye “The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger.”

Mohsen Emadi translated by Lyn Coffin, Standing on Earth “Death is when the heart does not beat and the clock beats. / Love is when the heart beats and the clock does not beat."

Gretchen Marquette, May Day “I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt.”

Anaïs Duplan, Take This Stallion “Choose your own / disappointments. Amass them in your secret place.”

Marianne Boruch, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing “Because it’s ancient: there is / no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.”

Justin Boening, Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last “When I say I / I mean the things I do.” 

Cynthia Cruz, How the End Begins "What ruined me once / Will ruin me always."

Donika Kelly, Bestiary “There isn’t an abstraction you believe in and you are sad for it.”

Lewis Mundt, The God of the Whole Animal "People are also, rightfully, terrified of poison."

Lucia Perillo, Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones “This was a hymn / that we sang on our knees"

[kavehakbar]

Going to tattoo this tweet onto my forehead. 

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I have new poems in The Poetry Review, New England Review, and Nashville Review.

[kavehakbar]

A dream came true for me today.

[kavehakbar]

I’ve got poems in the new issues of FIELD and the Indiana Review.

[kavehakbar]

I've got three (!) new poems in the November issue of Poetry, part of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow portfolio. The first time I read my fellow Fellows' (heh) work here I got real real misty. It happened again when we all read together at Dodge. Each of their poems is so important, so singularly exciting and brilliant and tight, and it's such a true and staggering overwhelm for my name/poems to appear alongside theirs. You can read the portfolio here.

[kavehakbar]

Here's an interview I did with Claudia Savage of Drunken Boat—she asks beautiful, searching questions & gets me talking about fear & forgiveness & exile & Berryman & so many other obsessions. I feel very very grateful to be able to share it (you can also see baby photos of me & hear some new poem recordings). 

[kavehakbar]

"What I started to feel about Kaveh’s work here is that it resembles a little bit what we would have hoped for from John Berryman if his much to be hoped for recovery had happened." - Don Share

Hear this, possibly the most generous sentence ever uttered about my work, and other impossibly kind and wise sentences about my poem and poems by Carolyn Forché and Victoria Chang, on this new episode of the Poetry Magazine Podcast. 

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I’ve got two poems in the October issue of Poetry (!!!). You can read the first poem here and the second poem here, then read the whole issue here. 

[kavehakbar]

I sent POETRY my first poems when I was 17. This has been the dream of dreams ever since then. The culmination of so much. It's hard to describe what all it means.