Kaveh Akbar is the author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2017) as well as the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). Akbar’s poems appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry, the New York Times, and elsewhere. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, the Levis Reading Prize, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Akbar is the Poetry Editor of the Nation. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.
The stillness you prize. Won’t prize you back. Two beefsteaks. Ripening on a windowsill. A purple tray. Piled with coal. From the field. Of solemn brothers calling. Your name in unison you learn. Men are irrelevant but. Persistent symmetries are not.
the waiters milled about filling sumacshakers clearing away plates of onion andradish my father pointed to each person whisperedPersian about the old man with the silver [...]
go ahead tread on me see if I care I am already unhuggable as a cactus and too big to fit on any lap keep your excuses short or better yet keep them to yourself any
Away from the cruel magnification of a shaving mirror, I clean up well. I am content with orange teeth and salty skin, with having borrowed my beauty
from the ocean. See my kelpy eyes, the pearl on my tongue? Flatter me, flatterer! I still care about dignity, like a blindfolded duke being led to the gallows. It’s hard not to smile
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