@mnvart // Kaveh Akbar, 'Calling A Wolf A Wolf' // @PinkRangerLB on Twitter // @kosmogrl // @devinsturk, '15 Proverbs for the Fellow Chronically Ill' // Jasmine Deporta // Anaïs Nin, House of Incest // the gentle wisdom uquiz by @inkskinned // Rora Blue, 'Sweet Dreams' // Hala Alyan, Dear Layal
— Forfeiting My Mystique, Kaveh Akbar, in '100 Queer Poems, an anthology' (2022)
[text ID: Some saints spent their whole childhoods biting their teachers' hands and / sprinkling salt into spider-webs, only to be redeemed by a fluke shock of grace just before death. May I feather into such a swan soon.]
The best book I’ve read so far this year is Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.
When poets write novels I always get very excited because they enter into their contract with words in a different way to other writers, with a certain level of distrust of language’s abilities, with an understanding of the disappointing paradox in metaphors, and with a playful abandon for convention.
This book is a great example of all of those things. It tore me open so many times and put me back together again, too. It’s got everything — family, identity, death, nationality, history, death, art, politics, death, love, war, did I mention death, and dreams where the dead speak to cartoon characters
"Grace to live at all—none of us did anything to deserve it. Being born. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it."
— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)
It is so lonely to feel deeply about the world and be met with the complete failure of language to communicate it. Poetry gets us marginally (but importantly!) closer than rhetorical language, like how standing on a roof gets one a few feet closer to grabbing a star than standing in the dirt. It makes the loneliness of being here a little easier to bear.
Kaveh Akbar, “Galloping Towards Delight: A Conversation with Kaveh Akbar and Ilya Kaminsky”, published in Magma Issue 83, Solitude, Summer 2022