Calling a Wolf a Wolf

Citation

Akbar, K. (2017). Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Alice James Books.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the debut full-length poetry collection of Kaveh Akbar, an Iranian American poet born in Tehran. It grew out of his earlier chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, from which several poems were drawn, and it won the Levis Reading Prize and Ploughshares' John C. Zacharis First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes' Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. It is a confessional book about alcoholism and recovery, but reviewers also read it as a book about spiritual hunger, about the limits of language and about identity across cultures.

The collection does not argue a thesis in the way a prose book does. Its argument is cumulative: a self is taken apart, rebuilt and examined again and again. Mandana Chaffa, reviewing the book for Jacket2, reads it as a loose reversal of Dante's Inferno, beginning with the dismantling of the self, moving through the rebirth of mortal desires and delights, and ending in what she calls a nascent grace. The poems are not arranged as a diary, and a book of only about a hundred pages repays being read more than once.

Prologue: "Soot"

The opening poem acts as a prologue that sketches the book's recurring subjects: self-destruction, revelation and renewal. Its speaker dreams of being a creature pulling out its own claws to sell at a market stall, an image of both a decision to end harmful behaviour and the vulnerability that comes with it. Pomegranates link the image to Persian culture and to the myth of Persephone.

Part I, "Terminal"

The first section sets out the situation of the speaker and the main registers of the book. "Wild Pear Tree" and "Do You Speak Persian?" are early poems. The second brings in the Persian language, which Akbar transliterates into the Latin alphabet, so that the reader can sound out phrases such as "delam barat tang shodeh" (I miss you) without being able to speak the language. The speaker's replies in Persian to a parent's questions about school and drinking show a gap between communication and connection.

The title poem, "Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)", appears early in this section. It is set in a rehabilitation centre and is written as a block of phrases separated by gaps rather than punctuation, so each fragment carries equal weight. Other poems in the section include "Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood", "Recovery", "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before", "Heritage", "Milk", "Learning to Pray" and "Supplication with Rabbit Skull and Bouquet".

Part II, "Hunger"

The second section, "Hunger", gathers poems such as "What Seems Like Joy", "Prayer", "Against Dying", "Against Hell", "Palmyra" and "No Is a Complete Sentence"; the titles alone show a mixture of address to God, argument against despair and attention to the natural world and to ruins. Hunger is also one of the book's central terms, for craving and for spiritual longing.

Part III, "Irons"

The final section, "Irons", closes the book. Poems in it include "An Apology", "Ways to Harm a Thing", "God" and "I Won't Lie This Plague of Gratitude". Chaffa's reading of the whole book as ending in a nascent grace is a useful guide to how these closing poems relate to the first section.

The "Portrait of the Alcoholic" Sequence

Ten poems whose titles begin with the phrase "Portrait of the Alcoholic" are distributed through all three sections, each with a different qualifying phrase, such as "with Home Invader and Housefly", "with Withdrawal", "with Doubt and Kingfisher" and "Three Weeks Sober". Together they work as a series of self-portraits at different moments, and they give the book a repeating pattern that holds its sections together.

Key Concepts

Context and Argument

• Confessional lyric: poetry written from a personal, autobiographical position.
• Portraiture: the self presented as a changing, incomplete picture rather than a fixed identity.

Parts I–III

• Addiction and recovery: the book's central experience, from drinking through inpatient treatment to sobriety.
• Language and bilingualism: English and Persian as ways of speaking, and the gaps between them.
• Spiritual practice: prayer, supplication and the speaker's relation to Islam and to God.
• Hunger: appetite as both physical craving and spiritual longing.
• Form as meaning: line breaks, white space, prose-like blocks and repetition used to carry the speaker's thinking.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Formal range. The poems vary from lineated lyrics to unpunctuated blocks of text, and the formal choices carry meaning. In the title poem, equal spacing between fragments puts trivial and serious thoughts on the same level.
• Bilingual and cross-cultural texture. The use of Persian, rendered in the Latin alphabet, invites readers into the poems while also marking what cannot be translated, which makes the account of heritage and distance concrete.
• Honest, unglamorised treatment of addiction. The Kenyon Review praised Akbar as "a sumptuous, remarkably painterly poet", and observed that the book is about addiction while also touching a larger existential emptiness and the exchange between spirits and spirituality.
• A recognisable overall design. The three sections and the repeating "Portrait" poems provide a frame, so a reader can follow a progress without it being a straight chronicle.

Limitations

• Demanding subject matter. The book deals with addiction, self-destruction and loss throughout, and some readers will find sustained reading emotionally heavy.
• One poet, one book. The collection is short and tied to a single speaker's experience, so by itself it gives no picture of contemporary poetry in general.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the poetry books on the site, this is the one contemporary single-author collection. It is a work to read and interpret rather than a guide. The Norton Introduction to Poetry explains the elements of poetry and the methods of reading a poem, and is a good companion for the first reading. The Norton Anthology of Poetry places Akbar's work against the tradition of poetry in English from the medieval period on, so its older poems help to show what is new here and what is inherited, for example the long history of the prayer poem and the self-portrait.

Culler's Theory of the Lyric is relevant because it challenges the habit of reading every lyric as the speech of a fictional person, which is a useful question for a confessional book such as this one. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a reference to consult for terms such as lyric, confessional poetry or prose poem.

How to Use This Book

The collection can be read by any undergraduate and by general readers of poetry. No prior knowledge of Persian or of Islam is needed.

Read it first through, in one or two sittings, to follow the movement from Part I to Part III. Then go back to a few poems and read them slowly aloud: "Do You Speak Persian?", the title poem, one or two of the "Portrait" poems and one of the poems about prayer. For each, note the form (lines, blocks, repetition), the speaker's address (to whom the poem speaks), and what the poem will not say.

For seminars, compare the "Portrait" poems with each other to see how the same frame is used differently, and set a poem against a related poem from the Norton anthology. A review such as Chaffa's in Jacket2 is a good example of close reading to model written work on. Because of the subject matter, readers who find the topic difficult should feel free to pace their reading.