Kaveh Akbars exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf

With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbars 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 bodys question, what now shall I repair? Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonancethe infinite void of a loved ones absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nationteasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.

Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bells 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 livesresonant, revelatory, and holy.