Pilgrim Bell: Poems [Paperback]

Kaveh Akbars exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up toCalling 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.

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. Akbars mesmerizing dexterity with language is at its most compelling when he is relentlessly pursuing the trutha hunt thats present in every poem in this volume.TIME

[Kaveh] Akbar is exquisitely senslC‹