Martyr!

     Planes are the best place to finish a book. You are above the human world, engine noises buzzing and humming, and best of all- everyone is leaving you alone. Only here can you absorb and envelope into the loving embrace of a sentence perfected, for it seems, only your eyes to hungrily consume. I finished Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! while in the sky this afternoon. So many, many tears hit my shoulders and danced sensually down my cheeks. After reading the Clarice Lispector quote on the final page, I closed the book and gave the cover a huge, wet kiss. Lipstick and all. 

    What can I ever give back to literature? What can I dawn onto the altar of word? The feeling this book has left me with is one of grace. It was dowsed in suffering, enlightened by acceptance, sick like war. There was bewilderment everywhere. Justice sang through the text. It was rotten with moments of deceit yet true like love. Martyr! was transparent, historic, and its ending tossed me into a pond of God-like clarity. Thank you and thank you. My love for writing, my impulse to extract my vast feelings from what I experience and sculpt them into a vessel through which I may be understood is-in a word- holy.