Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf 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. 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...

"Daniele is a young poet plagued by an unknown darkness, “an invisible disease of the heart, or of the mind.” He refuses to conform to society’s expectations―finding a job, starting a family―yet he struggles to define a path of his own and find a sense of purpose in life. In a desperate attempt to pull himself out of a dangerous spiral of emptiness and self-destruction, Daniele accepts a job at a pediatric hospital in Rome, the Bambino Gesù,...