finished reading

I don't know what to say about this book.  It's gritty, dysthymic, and beautiful.  Maybe it's poignant.  I am not 100% sure I even know how it ended--it's ambiguous.  It's a character study like nothing I've ever read before; tackling topics of addiction and sobriety, grief, art and poetry, martyrdom, LGBT+, American immigrant experiences, parenthood, and abandonment.  Definitely not light-hearted reading.  The narrative thread has several points of view, although most is Cyrus Shams': dreams, poems, and stream-of-conscious.  

I'll be honest, this was almost a Did Not Finish.

From the publisher:

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.

#52BookClub prompt 40: Stream of consciousness narrative