Pilgrim Bell: Poems

by Kaveh Akbar

Overview

Kaveh Akbar’s exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf


With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance—the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation—teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.


Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives—resonant, revelatory, and holy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450598
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	08/03/2021
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	133,424
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.

Table of Contents

Pilgrim Bell 5

Vines 6

The Miracle 7

Ghazal for the Men I Once Was 9

Reza's Restaurant, Chicago, 1997 10

There Are 7,000 Living Languages 12

The Value of Fear 15

Mothers I Once Was 17

Pilgrim Bell 18

I Wouldn't Even Know What to Do with a Third Chance 19

Pilgrim Bell 23

My Empire 24

In the Language of Mammon 26

My Father's Accent 27

There Is No Such Thing as an Accident of the Spirit 29

Forfeiting My Mystique 30

Cotton Candy 34

Against the Parts of Me That Think They Know Anything 36

Pilgrim Bell 37

Seven Years Sober 38

Pilgrim Bell 41

An Oversight 42

Ultrasound 43

Palace Mosque, Frozen 45

How Prayer Works 46

How to Say the Impossible Thing 47

Shadian Incident 48

Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats 49

Escape to the Palace 51

Ghazal for a National Emergency 52

Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic 53

Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong 56

Pilgrim Bell 57

Against Memory 58

The Palace 63

Notes 73

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/21/2021

In this rich and moving collection, Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf) writes poems of contradiction and ambivalence centered on religious belief and ethnic and national identity. Evocative and polyphonic, surprising but never artificially shocking, Akbar’s poems flit from the divine to the corporeal in the same breath. In “Vines”: “when I saw God/ I trembled like a man”—and a few lines later, “I live like a widow// every day a heave of knitting patterns and sex toys.” In “The Miracle,” the poet confesses to himself: “Gabriel isn’t coming for you. If he did/ would you call him Jibril, or Gabriel like you/ are here? Who is this even for?” Within that question lies a tension between cultures, religions, loyalties, and ways of being in and looking at the world. As an Iranian-born American, Akbar does not feel that either of these nationalities can fully encompass his identity. “Some nights I force/ my brain to dream me/ Persian by listening/ to old home movies/ as I fall asleep,” he explains. This impressive, thoughtful work shimmers with inventive syntax and spiritual profundity. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Kaveh Akbar shapes language into prayer, into body, into patchwork — clarifying only what can be known." —NPR.org

“[Pilgrim Bell] is bracing in its honesty and noteworthy in its steadfast adherence to finding the spiritual in even the most mundane settings. Akbar’s mesmerizing dexterity with language is at its most compelling when he is relentlessly pursuing the truth—a hunt that’s present in every poem in this volume.”—TIME

“[Kaveh] Akbar is exquisitely sensitive to how language can function as both presence and absence. . . . His practice of taking language apart, and harnessing the empty space around it, makes even the most familiar words seem eerie and unexpected.”—The New Yorker

“Very few living writers write so achingly toward God as Kaveh Akbar. Real faith, Akbar writes in Pilgrim Bell, “passes first through the body/ like an arrow”; each of the poems in this collection finds its target.”—Lauren Groff, The Guardian, Best Books of 2021

“Emphatic and honest. . . . Perfect on the page, the voice and personality of each poem are thoroughly, itchingly alive, with an intimacy that, for all its naked self-revelation, feels bound to be engaged in the work of nations.”—World Literature Today

“This is the invitation Pilgrim Bell extends: to join a conversation in which violence interrupts beauty and beauty interrupts violence, in which doubt interrupts faith and faith interrupts doubt, in which difference interrupts shared humanity and shared humanity interrupts difference, ad infinitum, as well they must.”—Ploughshares

“Lyrical, profound, and honest, the kind of collection to which a reader will return.”—Library Journal, starred review

“Rich and moving. . . . This impressive, thoughtful work shimmers with inventive syntax and spiritual profundity.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Incandescent. . . . [Pilgrim Bell] illuminates questions of divinity and language in swift, surprising lyrics.”—Booklist, starred review

“Pilgrim Bell is a book that chooses honesty over beauty, which makes it a breathtaking text.”—Hanif Abdurraqib

“Kaveh Akbar is truly a great writer, and his new collection Pilgrim Bell is a marvel. Like his previous work, it dazzles us. . . . He is incapable of setting down a line that’s less than luminous. Pilgrim Bell is destined to become a classic, another blazing torch added to the eternal flames.”—Mary Karr

“Kaveh Akbar is the sorcerer’s sorcerer, masterful in the way he wields language for us, for these poems, to sound his Pilgrim Bell. Profound and singular, smart and sad and funny, but most of all truth’s beauty and beauty’s truth sung. . . . We need Pilgrim Bell. We need Kaveh Akbar.”—Tommy Orange

“Working at and along the outer edges of language, Pilgrim Bell calls us to attention and to attend to that which poetry and prayer share, while simultaneously demanding that we tend to the political, the social, the erotic—all that is quotidian and human. Persimmons and empire; saffron and refugee camps; exile, oleander, and the Rolling Stones—all the stuff of poetry. And of prayer. In Pilgrim Bell, the poet Kaveh Akbar, ‘God’s incarnate spit in the mud,’ takes us down to the ground, to the prosaic, the dismissed and overlooked, the better to talk to the great Silence, bearer of many names including that of God.”—M. NourbeSe Philip

From the Publisher

★ 06/01/2021

The poems in Akbar's highly anticipated second collection (after Calling a Wolf a Wolf) span and invert boundaries, addressing addiction, faith, language, history, self, family, and power. Instead of purporting to provide answers ("obviousness ruins things"), the poems exist in between—"Somewhere between wonder./And shame"—like the messy experience of being. Embedded in each poem is the question of how to live and what responsibility comes with knowledge: how to live as an addict after addiction; how to believe while reserving "the right./To refuse. Enchantment"; how to exist in a nation that questions your existence. Probing the tension between doubt and faith, Akbar questions stories meant to console or justify: "That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering/but to experience it seems—can I say this?—/a waste?" A wry wariness adds levity to the collection, as in a speaker's exasperated response to a directive epigraph from John Donne: "yes John I tried that the results were/underwhelming." The collection's final poem, "The Palace," is a tour de force that weaves all its themes into a powerfully resonant close. VERDICT Lyrical, profound, and honest, the kind of collection to which a reader will return.—Amy Dickinson, Montrose Regional Lib. District, CO

Library Journal