Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet who has received honors including a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In February 2019, he was named an editor for Poetry Daily. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The New York Times, among others. His debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK, and his chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. Akbar founded Divedapper, and, along with Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he writes a weekly column for the Paris Review called “Poetry RX.” Previously, he ran The Quirk, a for-charity print literary journal. He has also served as Poetry Editor for BOOTH and Book Reviews Editor for the Southeast Review.
Poetry by Kaveh Akbar
Teenagers are texting each other pictures
of orchids on their phones, which are also orchids.
Old men in orchid pennyloafers
furiously trade orchids.
angels don’t care about humility
you shaved your head spent eleven days half-starved in solitary
and not a single divine trumpet wept into song now it’s lonely all over
your mouth a moonless system
of caves filling with dust
the dust thickened to tar
your mouth opened and tar spilled out