He recalls with bittersweet nostalgia memories in which addiction appears as another person, one with whom he feels a sort of camaraderie. At the same time, he contrasts this depersonalization with an oddly tender personification of addiction. It seems that by observing himself from the viewpoint of a bystander he escapes the fear of self that is intrinsic to his addiction. As he continues to step out of himself to view himself as Other, he discovers who he wants to become. Still, the process is ongoing and always undoing itself, as he alternately embraces and dismisses his physical reality.Īs the poems stretch onward, the reader senses that Akbar’s vacillating disassociations are much more than symptoms of his disease. One senses that Akbar’s journey to sobriety is a sort of out-of-body experience in which he must somehow reclaim ownership of his own corporality to truly heal. At first, his body barely exists at all, envisioned as smoke, or a shadow that merely “follows around.” As time goes on, he grows to appreciate his own form. Weaving in and out of the poems are recurring dissociations with the body that at once longs to live and works to kill him. He expresses his detachment from physical reality through shifting depictions of how he relates to his own form. To avoid near-certain death he begins the never-ending work of self-denial as seen through the poems, he alternatively blooms and wilts so that he may be daily reborn into a body that is a little less broken than before.Īkbar’s salvation largely entails coming to terms with the visceral reality of his own body.

At one point, he recalls telling his mother he has only six months left, thanks to the destruction of his addictions.

Like the star, Akbar must die to really live. Calling a Wolf a Wolf is (in part) about redemption and the dream-like ways in which it both exists and does not exist. “to make life first you need a dying star…” writes Kaveh Akbar in a poem from his debut full-length poetry collection.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar