Pilgrim BellPilgrim Bell

"With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar's second collection takes it 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 body's question, 'What now shall I repair?' Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion or dissonance--the infinite void of a loved one's absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation--teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness"--