#martyr! by kaveh akbar

[frogndtoad]

tagged by @gideonthefirst for top 9 books read in 2023 or 9 books from my 2024 tbr! talked abt the books i loved last year in december so im also doing tbr :] 1 - Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

2 - The abridged Les Miserables that I got at a used booksale ages ago and im Excited to have opinions about

3 - There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

4 - Blackouts: A Novel by Justin Torres

5 - Black Punk Now edited by James Spooner and Chris L Terry

6 - The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

7 - I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan

8 - Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver

9 - Moby Dick by Herman Melville

you and conrad have covered a lot of bases w/ppl i know to tag but im gonna be so brave anyway. tagging @jenna-louise-coleman @chronotopes @fruitygay @look-at-the-stars-tonight @roanoky @verbinperfectview and anyone else who wants to!!!!

[galina]

The best book I’ve read so far this year is Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

When poets write novels I always get very excited because they enter into their contract with words in a different way to other writers, with a certain level of distrust of language’s abilities, with an understanding of the disappointing paradox in metaphors, and with a playful abandon for convention.

This book is a great example of all of those things. It tore me open so many times and put me back together again, too. It’s got everything — family, identity, death, nationality, history, death, art, politics, death, love, war, did I mention death, and dreams where the dead speak to cartoon characters

[dk-thrive]

"Grace to live at all—none of us did anything to deserve it. Being born. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it."

— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)

[smokefalls]

Incredible, how naming something took nothing away from its stagger. Language could be totally impotent like that.

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[aaknopf]

Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s propulsive debut novel, tells the tale of Cyrus Shams, the son of a lost mother (victim of a 1988 U. S. Naval snafu in the Persian Gulf that killed 290 people on a commercial airliner) and the long-suffering father who emigrated to Fort Wayne, IN with his baby boy. We meet Cyrus as a student of poetry at Keady University and a reformed addict. In this excerpt, he’s at the local open mic with his friends; we also share one of the poems from Cyrus’s bookofmartyrs.docx, helpfully supplied by Akbar, the poet behind the fictional poet.

. .

The Naples Tuesday night open mic had become a mainstay of Cyrus and Zee’s friendship. It was a small affair, not much to distinguish it from the myriad other open mics happening elsewhere in the country—except this was their open mic, their organic community of beautiful weirdos—old hippies singing Pete Seeger, trans kids rapping about liberation, passionate spoken-word performances by nurses and teenagers and teachers and cooks. As with any campus open mic, there was the occasional frat dude coming to play sets of smirky acoustic rap covers and overearnest breakup narratives. But even they were welcome, and mostly it felt like a safe little oasis of amongness in the relative desert of their Indiana college town, a healthy way to spend the time they were no longer using to get drunk or high.   Naturally, Naples didn’t have its own sound equipment, so Zee would usually show up fifteen minutes early with his beat-up Yamaha PA to set up for Sad James, who hosted every week. Sad James was called this to distinguish him from DJ James, a guy who cycled nightly through the campus bars. DJ James was not a particularly interesting artist, but he was well-known enough in the campus community to warrant Sad James’s nominative prefix, which began as a joke but somehow stuck, and to which Sad James had grown accustomed with good humor, even occasionally doing small shows under the name. Sad James was a quiet white guy, long blond hair framing his lightly stubbled face, who played intensely solemn electronic songs, punctuated by sparse circuit-bent blips and bloops, and over time at Keady, he had become one of Zee and Cyrus’s most resilient and trusted friends.   On this night, Cyrus had read a poem early, an older experimental piece from a series where he’d been assigning words to each digit 0–9, then using an Excel document to generate a lyric out of those words as the digits appeared in the Fibonacci sequence: “lips sweat teeth lips spread teeth lips drip deep deep sweat skin,” etc. It was bad, but he loved reading them out loud, the rhythms and repeti­tions and weird little riffs that emerged. Sad James did an older piece where the lyrics “burning with the human stain / she dries up, dust in the rain” were repeated and modulated over molten beeps from an old circuit-bent Game Boy. Zee—a drummer in his free time who idolized J Dilla and John Bonham and Max Roach and Zach Hill in equal measure—hadn’t brought anything of his own to perform that evening, but did have a little bongo to help accompany any acoustic acts who wanted it.   On the patio listening to Cyrus talk about his new project, Zee said, “I could see it being a bunch of different poems in the voices of all your different historical martyr obsessions?” Then to Sad James, Zee added, “Cyrus has been plastering our apartment with these big black-and-white printouts of all their terrifying faces. Bobby Sands in our kitchen, Joan of Arc in our hallway.”   Sad James made his eyes get big.   “I just like having them present,” Cyrus said, slumping into his chair. He didn’t add that he’d been reading about them in the library, his mystic martyrs, that he’d taped a great grid of their grayscale printed faces above his bed, half believing it would work like those tapes that promised to teach you Spanish while you slept, that some­how their lived wisdoms would pass into him as he dreamt. Among the Tank Man, Bobby Sands, Falconetti as Joan of Arc, Cyrus had a picture of his parents’ wedding day. His mother, seated in a sleeved white dress, smiling tightly at the camera while his father, in a tacky gray tux, sat grinning next to her holding her hand. Above their heads, a group of attendees held an ornate white sheet. It was the only picture of his mother he had. Next to his mother, his father beamed, bright in a way that made it seem he was radiating the light himself.   Zee went on: “So you could write a poem where Joan of Arc is like, ‘Wow, this fire is so hot’ or whatever. And then a poem where Hussain is like, ‘Wow, sucks that I wouldn’t kneel.’ You know what I mean?”   Cyrus laughed.   “I tried some of that! But see, that’s where it gets corny. What could I possibly say about the martyrdom of Hussain or Joan of Arc or whoever that hasn’t already been said? Or that’s worth saying?”   Sad James asked who Hussain was and Zee quickly explained the trial in the desert, Hussain’s refusing to kneel and being killed for it.   “You know, Hussain’s head is supposedly still buried in Cairo?” Zee said, smiling. “Cairo, which is in which country again?”   Cyrus rolled his eyes at his friend, who was, as Cyrus liked to remind him when he got too greatest-ancient-civilization-on-earth about things, only half Egyptian.   “Damn,” Sad James said. “I would’ve just kneeled and crossed my fingers behind my back. Who am I trying to impress? Later I could call take-backsies. I’d just say I tripped and landed on my knees or something.”   The three friends laughed. Justine, an open mic regular whose Blonde on Blonde–era pea-coat-and-harmonica-rack Bob Dylan act was a mainstay of the open mic, came outside to ask Zee for a cigarette. He obliged her with an American Spirit Yellow, which she lit around the corner as she began speaking into her cell phone.   In moments like these Cyrus still sometimes felt like asking to bum one too—he’d been a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker before he got sober, and continued his habit even after he’d kicked everything else. “Quit things in the order they’re killing you,” his sponsor, Gabe, told him once. After a year clean he turned his attention to cigarettes, which he finally managed to kick completely by tapering: from one and a half packs a day to a pack to half a pack to five cigarettes and so on until he was just smoking a single cigarette every few days and then, none at all. He could probably get away with bumming the occasional cigarette now and again, but in his mind he was saving that for something momentous: his final moments lying in the grass dying from a gunshot wound, or walking in slow motion away from a burning building.   “So what are you thinking then? A novel? Or like . . . a poetic mar­tyr field guide?” asked Zee.   “I’m really not sure yet. But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accom­modate her. That’s what I’m after.”

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

Browse Kaveh Akbar's poetry collections and follow Kaveh on Instagram @kavehakbar.kavehakbar.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[brynnasaurus]

This passage from Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! (which I've really been loving, in case anyone's looking for a book recommendation) stopped me dead in my tracks, and figured some of you fine folks here on tumblr dot com might relate as well

[heavenlyyshecomes]

cryingkshdkvlbl

[zeenmrala]

"He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not-alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders."

- Kaveh Akbar, MARTYR! (2024)

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[seab]

I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be. Compared to even the dullest dog humans can smell nothing. But compare us with—what?—a monkey who can say “apple” with her hands?—and we are the gods of language, everything else just chirping and burping. And how fitting, too, that our superpower as a species, the source of our divinity, stems from such a broken invention.

—Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[twinsunsintatooine]

it’s about to be 1am and it very much will be past 1am by the time I finish typing this out and post this, but i just finished ‘martyr!’ by kaveh akbar, and i wont be able to write a proper review until the weekend but i really just need some time to absorb what i just read

jesus that was incredible i cant say ive read anything quite like this in a very very long time

kaveh akbar i will love ur writing till the day i die and sing ur praises till i am mute and i will definitely be checking out his poetry after this!!!! i truly cannot believe this is a debut novel with how immensely that has changed my life

[readingheartreadingheart]

I am so eager to read Akbar's first foray into fiction! I ordered a signed copy of Martyr! from an independent bookstore in Iowa and it is such a delight to have this unique signature in my collection. I adore his poetry: Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a stunning collection of confessional, heartbreaking, and strikingly honest poems. Akbar has such a gorgeous way with words and I do not doubt that his prose is equally as powerful. His words are meant to be treasured.

[dk-thrive]

What I want to say is that I was happy. Not always, not even mostly. But I did know real, deep joy. Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and I just used my lifetime’s allotment especially quickly... But I don’t think it was a tragedy, my life. Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.

— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)

[smokefalls]

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[aaknopf]

[opulentquotes]

She was looking at herself in the little gold mirror we had hanging near the entrance. It was something I’d come to love about her, in time. It wasn’t narcissism, the way she was always looking at herself. I recognized later there was a kind of wonder in it, running her fingers over her smile lines, the skin of her forehead, as if to say, “Where did you come from? This skin, what a strange envelope!

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar