Kaveh Akbar on the Mystery of His Survival

Photo: Marlon James

“Even the most skeptical writers in the world, the most feet-on-the-ground writers in the world, talk about the process of writing by using language like “the time just flew by, the hours just flew by,” or they’ll say “such and such phrase just came to me.” They’ll mine the language of the supernatural to talk about what’s happening.”

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, will be published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation.