Katy Waldman

The person exclaiming “martyr!” in “Martyr!” is Cyrus Shams, a poet and former alcoholic, who was also formerly addicted to drugs. Cyrus is in his late twenties. He’s anguished and ardent about the world and his place in it, and recovery has left him newly and painfully obsessed with his deficiencies. “Beautiful terrible,” he writes in one of his Word docs, “how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcot…