As a book reviewer, I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher or author to facilitate this review. I received no other compensation, and all opinions are always 100% my own.
Cyrus Shams is newly sober, sometimes suicidal, fascinated by martyrs and death and the cultures which honor them though for varying reasons. He’s obsessed with his plan to write a book of poems celebrating them. His mother was killed in a plane crash when he was 5, her plane senselessly shot down by the US military, the country which Cyrus now calls home. His father left Iran and immigrated with Cyrus, only to live out the rest of his life working long hours at a Midwestern chicken farm before dying when Cyrus was in college. Cyrus is now a sometime poet, addict, drunk, determined to solve existential questions of loneliness, abandonment, and belonging, in the company of the family of sorts he has cobbled together out of other former addicts and misfits, including the young man he lives with who is his best friend and occasional partner.
He’s exploring the life of his uncle, who as an Iranian soldier was forced to play a role of the “angel of death,” riding a horse around a battlefield at dusk to comfort the dying. When he hears of a terminally ill Iranian painter living out her final days and hours holding court in a Brooklyn art gallery, he’s fascinated–what can she teach him about death? Plus one of her paintings depicts a similar scene to that described by his uncle. He goes to visit her. The two connect in a deep mysterious way, and while he does get some answers, he also gets more questions.
Martyr! is an unusual book. It starts really slow and it ends very oddly, but it’s worth the read. The poems that Cyrus is writing are gorgeous, and his musings on life, death, the meanings and connections we make or miss, are raw and honest and often amusing. I enjoyed this book, and I recommend it!