Book Review: Portrait of the Alcoholic by Kaveh Akbar

Reviewed by Trista Edwards

Portrait of the Alcoholic
Poems by Kaveh Akbar
Sibling Rivalry Press, January 2017
$12.00; 48 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1943977277

Thirst drives the body. Thirst keeps the body alive, keeps the body reaching, exploring, wanting more. It is the trait of an artist—necessary for creation. No artist wants to be satiated for fear of imaginative stagnation or stifled passion. Yet, thirst has a tipping point, one that can destroy when craving is not what drives but what controls.

Kaveh Akbar’s chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, possesses a speaker in recovery but also a speaker—an artist—grappling with the anxiety of stagnation. In “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient),” the speaker contemplates the severity of his vices:

                                                 I am less horrible than I could be          I’ve never set a
        house on fire                 never thrown a firstborn off a bridge               still my whole
life I answered every cry for help with a pour with a turning away      I’ve
given this coldness many names           thinking if it had a name it would have a
solution        thinking if I called a wolf a wolf I might dull its fangs

Anxiety manifests in the unease of naming, which could present a solution to the speaker’s inner turmoil. To call a wolf a wolf distills its wildness and contains it to language. Here the speaker questions if naming his vices, perhaps calling an alcoholic an alcoholic, dulls them in a way to make them knowable and can provide a solution and a path to treatment. The quandary rests in the necessity of stifling this destructive thirst and the juxtaposition of the artist seeking to keep wildness in language in spite of the paradox of having to name, i.e. possess, what needs to be kept wild.

Some boys, as the speaker details in the collection’s opening poem, “Some Boys Aren’t Born They Bubble,” are born with this wild thirst:

They do as desire

        demands           when they dance their bodies plunge

                                    into space and recover             the music stays

        in their breastbones they sing songs

                                about storms then dry their shoes on porches

And then further along:

                                               They are desperate

                    to lick and be licked   sometimes one will eat                                                                                                                

        all the food in a house or break every bone

                    in his jaw         sometimes one will disappear into himself

            like a ram charging a mirror when this happens

                    they all feel it   afterwards the others dream                                                                                                                  

        of rain their pupils boil they light black candles

                       and pray the only prayer they know    oh lord

        spare this body             set fire to another

The speaker pleads for survival—a forgiveness for burning too bright—and asks for desire not to be the flame that consumes the body. Desire here has the potential to be in control as the boys do as desire demands. The struggle with an almost hedonistic appeal to consume all that is offered remains the driving point of this collection. How does one oscillate between passion and danger? Creative thirst and the thirst that kills? The need to possess by naming and the desire to let what is wild be wild and nameless? Akbar makes no apologies for hunger in this chapbook and makes clear his desire is, as a poet, to keeping burning.

Trista Edwards is a recent graduate of the University of North Texas with a Ph.D. in Creative Writing. She is also the curator and editor of the anthology, Till The Tide: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2015). She is currently working on her first full-length poetry collection but until then you can read her poems at The Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, 32 Poems, The Adroit Journal, Sou’wester, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and more. She writes about travel, ghosts, and poetry on her blog, Marvel + Moon. Trista is a contributing editor at Luna Luna Magazine.