N an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. I can no longer remember the being afraid, only that it came to an end.Ībout They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Sometimes you have to march all the way to Galilee or the literal foot of God himself before you realize you've already passed the place where you were supposed to die. From "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before": Sometimes you just have to leave whatever's real to you, you have to clomp through fields and kick the caps off all the toadstools.
Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight. This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. 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.Įlectrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.Literati is proud to partner with our neighbors at the Neutral Zone to welcome Kaveh Akbar and Hanif Abdurraqib who will be reading from their latest work Calling a Wolf a Wolf and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” -Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and FuriesĬyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran 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. Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning-in faith, art, ourselves, others-in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
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