“Be kind to yourself and to other poets. There are so many people in the world who would conspire against our joy, who would mistake our reverent wonder for idleness. Against everything, we have to protect our permeability to wonder. That’s the nucleus around which all interesting art orbits.”
—Kaveh Akbar, in “The Whole Self: Our Thirteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the Jan/Feb issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2018)













