#266: FORBIDDEN MERCIES.  Expanding on his 2017 poetry chapbook Portrait of an Alcoholic, Kaveh Akbar produced in the same year an extraordinary first full-length collection, Calling A Wolf A Wolf (Alice James Books); in 2021, he followed it with Pilgrim Bell, from Graywolf Press.  In both these books the emotion can range from the anguished and raw to the powerfully celebratory; in both the craft is masterly, the poetic voice achieved, individual and sustained.  Even the lightest and happiest of the poems has a depth charge.  Born in Iran, his Islamic background gives a large iconic space to his subjects: “Left to the real world I tend / to swell up like roots in the rain, / tend to get all lost in hymns and astrology charts.”  True to the title of his chapbook, one of the places he knows he can get most fearfully lost is in the bottle; that battle dominates a chunk of the first book, but in the second as well he writes “Some pain / stays so long its absence becomes / a different pain.”  Very few poets have ever captured the ongoingness, the constancy of this particular fight.  “The boat I am building / will never be done.”  Despite his residence in the States since childhood, he cannot, like so many of the poets of the counterculture, get over how strange and threatening America is: “I am not there. / I am elsewhere in America (I am always / elsewhere in America) writing this.”  “The shallow trap, America / catching / only what is too small to eat.”  The poems, oracular and compelling, are familial (the hilarity of two brothers interrupted at prayer), political (an elegy for a community of Hui Muslims attacked by the People’s Liberation Army in China), dense with multiple and ricocheting metaphor, complexly crowded with emotions and always, always accomplished in craft.  “Mistyping in an email I write, / I lose you so much today, / then leave it. / Forbidden mercies, water bowl held to a prisoner’s lips,” he writes,

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.

Lose me today, so much.