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well that was just excellent

What a beautiful book � the layered narratives and time jumps in this were so good. I could see where parts of the plot were headed fairly early in the story, but I didn't even mind that the twists in the back half weren't so twisty. I was so impressed by the writing, I had to tab so many quotes from the book, and scenes that I wanted to remember.

Cyrus is a poet who doesn't write, working a day job as an actor who feigns being terminally ill in order to train residents at a hospital on how to behave. He's lonely, grappling with his sobriety, and he feels adrift. When he learns about a woman with terminal cancer who has taken up residence in a Brooklyn museum to talk to people (this is her art installation), he decides to visit New York to interview her for a book he wants to write about martyrs.

Each chapter of this book begins with a different reference material � some are fictional chapters of his book or his poems, others are legal documents from the U.S. in regards to the plane crash that killed Cyrus' mother when he was a baby, a plane crash caused by U.S. missiles.

I think the most compelling parts of this book for me came out of some of the other narrators. You hear from both his deceased father when he was still alive, talking about raising Cyrus in the lead up to and years after his wife's death. You hear from his mom as a young girl and later as a new wife living in America and Iran, and one meaningful relationship she develops. And, most compelling to me, you hear from his uncle who served in the Iranian army in a unique role � he donned black and rode around battlefields, emulating the angel of death to inspire the wounded soldiers to give up and die. His uncle now lives plagued by debilitating PTSD.

All books should be written by poets, truly. There were so many lines in this book that I loved, and a casual beauty to his turns of phrases. I'm sharing a few quotes I really loved, but there are too many to count:

"He wanted to be on "the right side of history," whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history."

"Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped."

"It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store."

"It's simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what's actually killing you clarifies a little."

"You Americans act like this stuff is over. Like George Bush standing on that ship in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. It's not over at ll. It's not in the past. You and I are sitting here right now because of it."