​Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is a novel following the recovery of an addict, Cyrus Shams, and his desire to make himself a martyr. After his mother dies in a plane shot down by US forces, Cyrus and his father, Ali, move to America to try and leave their grief behind. Ali gets a job at a chicken farm cleaning eggs and tries to support Cyrus until he goes to college. Cyrus attends Keady University where he meets Zee, a soon to be friend/lover, where they start doing drugs, at one point nearly chopping Cyrus’s toe off while high with an axe for a voyeuristic man. However, Cyrus begins to spiral into addiction where he finds himself finally crawling out of with the help of his sponsor, Gabe. While two years sober at an open mic, and attempting to write his book on martyrs, one of their friends suggests Cyrus travel to New York City from Indiana to meet an artist. The artist, Orkideh, is doing her final show, ‘Death-Speak’, in which she sits and converses with visitors on death as she will be dying from cancer soon. Cyrus can see it as a huge part of his book and so enlists the help of Zee to join him in New York for the weekend. While at the museum, Orkideh and Cyrus meet and begin to have a conversation over the next few days about death, martyrdom, other visitors, and addiction. On one of the nights, Zee and Cyrus have a large argument about how Cyrus sees Zee’s life amounting to nothing while he is trying to make something of his death. The following day, Cyrus goes to the exhibit, though finds Orkideh had taken pills and died the night before. Then, after fainting and recovering, Cyrus gets a phone call from the curator needing to discuss Orkideh, where it is eventually revealed that Orkideh is Cyrus’s mother. The curator and Cyrus meet at the park, where she describes what happened to his mother, that her lover got on the plane instead of her, how she fled to America after, and how she built her life as an artist. Afterward, Zee calls Cyrus where they meet at the park. Though, this time Cyrus can see how selfish he was dragging Zee along, not only to New York, but how terrible of a friend he is. The novel ends in a surrealist moment where the city is morphing and changing around them after all the death and the truths that had been revealed.
 
Along with the main narrative, Akbar weaves moments of Cyrus’s mother’s past into the story as well as dream sequences of famous people talking to people Cyrus knows. Also spread throughout are draft excerpts of Cyrus’s book about martyrs. It’s a really engaging, passionate, and intensely visual novel about addiction, recovery, and friendships. I was deeply moved by the conversations Cyrus has with Orkideh and astounded at the way Akbar pulled in references to religion and the philosophical nature of the inner thoughts of the characters. I also found it especially powerful when a story that is recounted about a man serving two military drafts (one for his dead brother and one for himself) parallels with how Orkideh’s lover dies and she must take her identity in the beginning to continue her life in America. A truly awe-inspiring novel.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar is a collection of poems that questions, asserts, and plays with the speaker’s place in religion, family, and America. Akbar works to create a narrative that, in a sense, is fearful of God, but soon traces his fear, not to God, but to the Americans he is surrounded by. Akbar writes about how he immigrated to America from Iran, being Muslim, and is continuously questioned and berated by people who despise him for no reason. The starkest of this is in the repeated lines, “At his elementary school in an American suburb,/a boy’s shirt says: “We Did It to Hiroshima, We Can Do It to Tehran!””. I loved the way Akbar is able to draw upon what we believe children, and the innocence that is associated with childhood, to be and defile that thinking with complete hatred given to the boy by his parents. It speaks to a much greater and sadder reality of the positive feedback loop of xenophobia in America.
 
Though, I found the poem that struck a deep chord in me was in ‘How Prayers Work’ where Akbar and his brother attempt to pray but his brother trips over a doorstop and they laugh uncontrollably. The final stanza was what blew me away. “It’s not that we forgot God or the martyrs or the Prophet’s holy word—quite the opposite, in fact, we were boys built to love what was right in front of our faces: my brother and I draped across each other, laughing tears into our prayer rugs.” This, I felt was the turning point in his understanding of Islam, and thus worked to show him that religion was much more than what he was taught. I found the repeated used of the different ‘Pilgrim Bell’ poems worked to keep a rhythm, both inside the stanzas with shorter, choppier phrases, and also in the collection as a whole being interspersed periodically. I also loved the poems ‘Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997’, ‘In the Language of Mammon’, ‘There is No Such Thing as an Accident of the Spirit’, and ‘Seven Years Sober’. This collection was powerful, heartfelt, and worked to create a sense of longing for family, religion, and peace within the self.
 
Final Rating: 5/5