Haunted Reflection: Review of Kaveh Akbar’s Portrait of the Alcoholic

by roy guzmán, guest book reviewer

For many years, my uncle was an alcoholic. Stories of his alcoholism have become walls in the architecture of my unconscious. The few times my estranged father visited me as a child, he too showed up drunk, boisterous, an intoxicating figure to his fans. Last year, my grandfather’s brother died in his sleep. He’d been an alcoholic most of his life, and the memories I have of him are painfully drenched with that sordid smell of urine, from “the wet mattresses” that poet Kaveh Akbar summons in his penetrating new collection, Portrait of the Alcoholic.

In an interview with the folks over at Up the Staircase Quarterly, Akbar echoes the poet Theodore Roethke when discussing the creative forces that go into his work: “The serious problems of life are never fully solved, but some states can be resolved rhythmically.” Roethke lived with mental illness, suffered several breakdowns, and drank all the time in his later years. Critics have commented on Roethke’s remarkable introspection in his oeuvre, the kind of introspection in Akbar’s work that one also can’t help but be transformed by. If the past is a painful house of matches, and if it is true—as Roethke writes in “The Waking”—that one senses one’s “fate” in what one “cannot fear,” then Akbar’s Portrait of the Alcoholic is an examination of the lessons, losses, struggles, and demons one encounters in that state of dipsomania, in the metaphors one engineers and confronts as one charts a path of acceptance and recovery.

The crux of Portrait of the Alcoholic begins with no hesitation in the poem that opens his collection, “Some Boys Aren’t Born They Bubble”: “they are desperate / to lick and be licked.” What is alcoholism, I’ve wondered, if not the intimacy one craves for something, at once, physical and metaphysical? The “licking” in Akbar’s poem is sensual and innocent, both an act of tenderness and relief. In that same poem, we find, “sometimes one will disappear into himself / like a ram charging a mirror when this happens / they all feel it.” In this state of intoxication, the self dissolves into a hurt multiplicity, into that kind of self-reflection only animal instincts can understand.

Carl Jung configures the collective unconscious to describe the platforms that Venn-diagram who we are as humans; those platforms that reveal to us cultural commonalities and, one might add, unconscious forces at the heart of human experience. But what happens when those fractures exist within one person, to devour the inner self, to magnify the alienation one might feel as an immigrant, as a self without a clear home, as a body yearning for its own body?

Born in Tehran, Iran, Akbar offers us poems here that mourn the loss of language (“I don’t remember how to say home / in my first language, or lonely, or light” in “Do You Speak Persian?”); love (“I love you, leave / me alone. See? There I go scab- / picking again” in “An Apology”); and even discipline (“when I say thirst, I mean defeated, / abandoned-in-faith, lonely-as-the-slow-charge-into-a-bayonet / thirst” in “Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober”)—embracing, instead, a turbulent and radical syntax:

For so long every step I’ve taken

Has been from one tongue to another.

To order the world:

I need, you need, he/she/it needs. (“Do You Speak Persian?”)

The course between languages is the new American asphalt. The order of the new world is, itself, a condition of intoxication. And, yet, this book’s many concerns surrounding addiction aren’t exclusive to the voice that haunts these poems. In highlight, “Despite Their Size Children Are Easy to Remember They Watch You,” Akbar remarks:

here is what I have lost clean teeth

god’s grammar olives cedar salt temptation rarely warns you

a useful model unpredictable as an arrow through the spine

its flightpath its feathery hole who among us hasn't wished to burst

In his poem, “the suicide kid,” Bukowski sets down a strange source echoed in Akbar’s poem:

I went to the worst of bars

hoping to get

killed.

but all I could do was to

get drunk

again.

Akbar has been “to the worst of bars.” Those teeth no longer in their prime are testament. That drive to burst is instinctive, human. In Akbar’s poems, what happens when your need to die can’t be actualized? What is luck if not the painful reminder that we haven’t burst through the face of every mirror in ourselves?

One thing that attracts me most about these poems is how naked and vulnerable they can be, yet how vigilant and self-aware. In “Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game,” Akbar writes, “I finally have answers to the questions I taught / my mother not to ask but now she won’t ask them.” These poems claim to have answers—and they do—but the questions exist somewhere else. These poems are restless because they understand that restlessness is a form of self-assurance, an indicator of life.

From a holy book I once learned: why sacrifice yourself to the void of someone else’s despair if there might not be any light at the end of their void?

But that light is why we write. And just as Akbar ends his collection—“The boat I am building / will never be done”—why would the voyage be over, why would the sea ever grow calm?

#bookreview #royguzmán #kavehakbar #portraitofthealcoholic