Martyr!Martyr!

"Cyrus Shams, the novel's hero, is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: a mother whose plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident and a father whose life in America was circumscribed by killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet whose obsession with martyrs leads him into 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."--Back cover.