Kaveh Akbar

Very few living writers write so achingly toward God as Kaveh Akbar . . . each of the poems in this collection finds its target

These are poems on the grand scale, staging dramas of cosmic light and dark

Kaveh Akbar is the sorcerer's sorcerer, masterful in the way he wields language . . . 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

A measured, quiet pondering of intense subjects and subjectivities... Pilgrim Bell insistently travels to necessary places, with regard to the intimacies of faith, the landscapes of empire and the performativity and honesty of poetry. The poems are deeply considered and show a contemplative maturation of Akbar's voice

What thrilled me most about this book was another commitment: the commitment to writing discomfort, or ugliness. Doing it well, and doing it without insisting upon beautification. Pilgrim Bell is a book that chooses honesty over beauty, which makes it a breathtaking text

Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA

Kaveh Akbar is truly a great writer, and his new collection Pilgrim Bell is a marvel. Like his previous work, it dazzles us. Akbar is an unlikely prophet - hilarious and irreverent and self-deprecating. Yet even nonbelievers will travel the circles of faith and hellscape, love and rebuke, through his captivating voice. He is incapable of setting down a line that's less than luminous. Pilgrim Bell is destined to become a classic

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 . . . 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

In this rich and moving collection, Akbar 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 . . . This impressive, thoughtful work shimmers with inventive syntax and spiritual profundity

Shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION* 
*AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021* 
**Selected as one of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2021** 
 
'Kaveh Akbar is the sorcerer's sorcerer, masterful in the way he wields language . . . 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 
 
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 rigour 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. 
 
America, I warn you, if you invite me into your home 
I will linger, 
 
kissing my beloveds frankly, 
pulling up radishes 
and capping all your pens. 
 
There are no good kings, 
only burning palaces. 
 
-from 'The Palace' 
 
'Very few living writers write so achingly toward God as Kaveh Akbar . . . each of the poems in this collection finds its target' LAUREN GROFF

Kaveh Akbar

Praise for Pilgrim Bell

Very few living writers write so achingly toward God as Kaveh Akbar . . . each of the poems in this collection finds its target

These are poems on the grand scale, staging dramas of cosmic light and dark

Kaveh Akbar is the sorcerer's sorcerer, masterful in the way he wields language . . . Profound and singular, smart and sad and funny, but most of all truth's beauty and beauty's truth sung . . . We ...

Very few living writers write so achingly toward God as Kaveh Akbar . . . each of the poems in this collection finds its target

These are poems on the grand scale, staging dramas of cosmic light and dark

Kaveh Akbar is the sorcerer's sorcerer, masterful in the way he wields language . . . Profound and singular, smart and sad and funny, but most of all truth's beauty and beauty's truth sung . . . We ...

Very few living writers write so achingly toward God as Kaveh Akbar . . . each of the poems in this collection finds its target

These are poems on the grand scale, staging dramas of cosmic light and dark

Kaveh Akbar is the sorcerer's sorcerer, masterful in the way he wields language . . . Profound and singular, smart and sad and funny, but most of all truth's beauty and beauty's truth sung . . . We ...

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