'Martyr!' by Kaveh Akbar
- Reed
- May 9
- 2 min read
Author: Kaveh Akbar
Rating: A
Vibe: Grief-soaked existential odyssey meets queer spiritual crisis—lush, philosophical, and brimming with longing.
Quick Take: Wild, brilliant, and gutting in equal measure—Martyr! reads like a prayer scribbled on a burning napkin: chaotic, gorgeous, and impossible to ignore.
Cyrus Shams is spiraling. He’s a bisexual, Iranian-American poet in his late 20s, grieving his parents, clinging to sobriety, and obsessed with martyrdom—not the heroic kind, but the kind that promises meaning in a world that feels hollow. When he says, “Martyrdom is like a button you can push to externally impose meaning,” you get the whole novel’s thesis in a single line. And really, that’s Cyrus: trying to detonate his pain into something holy.
This is a debut novel, but don’t let that fool you—Akbar writes with the urgency of someone who clawed his way through poetry and prayer and addiction to arrive at the page. You can feel how hard he worked to teach himself narrative, and yet the novel never feels labored. It’s messy, but intentionally so. Lush with metaphor, haunted by theology, and crackling with queerness—not the tidy kind, but the aching, amorphous kind. The kind that lives in longing and dislocation. The kind that doesn’t always get a parade.
At its core, Martyr! is about the wreckage we carry and the meaning we try to make from it. Cyrus has lost both parents—his mother in a plane crash he can’t stop replaying, and his father to a quieter erosion of grief. He’s newly sober, spiritually feral, and chasing ghosts across the country: from a dreamlike drug den to the Brooklyn Museum, where he meets Orkideh, a dying performance artist staging her own death. Their conversations are dense and dazzling, tinged with Eastern mysticism, American disillusionment, and queer hunger for transcendence.
What struck me most wasn’t just the lyricism (though there’s plenty—Akbar can wring poetry out of blood, bone, and broken teeth), but the honesty. The self-harm, the drug use, the obsessive need to be seen—it’s all laid bare. There’s a scene where Cyrus nearly lets someone chop off his toe for cash and attention. And as horrifying as that is, it also makes emotional sense. For Cyrus, pain is currency. Attention is sacrament. And martyrdom is a kind of shortcut to absolution.
But this isn’t just trauma porn. The novel is full of strange beauty—wild horses, prophetic dreams, and a recurring flirtation with apocalypse. It’s got humor too, sharp and self-aware. And in Zee—Cyrus’s former lover, friend, and emotional ballast—we get a rare kind of character in queer fiction: the loyal witness. Someone who sees Cyrus not as a metaphor or tragedy, but as a person. It’s a love story, kind of. But it’s also a reckoning. It demands to know, what do we owe the people we love? What do we owe ourselves?
Akbar doesn’t hand us easy answers. The book ends in ambiguity and the final scene is devastating. Not because it offers closure, but because it refuses to.
