Kaveh Akbar: Martyr!

The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse is an anthology edited by Kaveh Akbar that spans roughly forty-three centuries of poetry about spirituality and the divine. Akbar describes its scope as beginning with Enheduanna and continuing through works associated with Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad Gita, the Psalms, Homer, and later global traditions. The collection includes poetry from Aboriginal, African, Mesoamerican, Iranian, and many other cultural contexts. Working on it alongside Martyr! gave Akbar a heightened awareness of the continuities between contemporary crises and historical human experience. He presents the anthology as evidence that people across time have repeatedly confronted cruelty, exile, ecological anxiety, doubt, and death.

The Waves (1931) is one of Virginia Woolf's most experimental novels, structured as a sequence of interwoven soliloquies voiced by six characters. The book largely forgoes plot, dialogue, and conventional characterization in favor of lyrical, interior monologues that trace the characters' inner lives from childhood to old age. Interludes describing the sea separate the soliloquies and provide an overarching poetic framework, reinforcing themes of time, identity, and the flux of experience. While admired for its beauty and innovation, the novel also challenged readers and critics who found it difficult and unintelligible. The Waves remains influential for its bold formal experimentation and its attempt to render consciousness musically on the page.

Set in Lorain, Ohio, during the Great Depression, 'The Bluest Eye' tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old African American girl who desperately wants blue eyes, believing they will make her more beautiful and accepted according to white cultural standards. The novel explores themes of race, class, and beauty standards, highlighting the destructive impact of internalized racism and societal pressures on Pecola and her family. Through a non-linear narrative and shifting perspectives, Morrison critiques the systemic racism and social stratification that contribute to Pecola's tragic downfall.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf is Kaveh Akbar’s debut poetry collection, written in the period surrounding his recovery from addiction. The poems confront compulsion, shame, spiritual longing, bodily vulnerability, and the instability of identity. Akbar’s language turns the experience of sobriety into an act of reconstruction, as the speaker learns how to inhabit ordinary life again. The collection also examines how poetry can provide refuge and structure when other forms of stability have collapsed. Its emotional intensity is balanced by wit, formal control, and a persistent movement toward gratitude and survival.

Pilgrim Bell explores the tensions between religious inheritance and secular life, especially through the perspectives of an Iranian-American speaker. The poems move among faith, doubt, addiction, violence, language, family, and cultural displacement. Akbar’s work is attentive to sound and image, using lyric compression rather than conventional narrative to create emotional and spiritual encounters. The collection’s poems question how inherited words and rituals can both constrain and sustain a person. It forms part of the artistic continuum that Akbar later extends through Martyr! .