Beautiful Signor

Cyrus Cassells

Beautiful Signor is a trenchant search for beauty in a world ravaged by cruelty. In the face of the AIDS pandemic and the specter of sexual wounding, Beautiful Signor gracefully reminds us of “romantic, erotic love as a gateway to spiritual love” (American Bookseller). With unwavering tenderness these poems bring the enduring legacy of the troubadours and Sufi poets into a modern lyric tradition.

ISBN: 9781556591242

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Cyrus Cassells, the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of eleven books of poetry: including The World That the Shooter Left Us, a Housatonic Book Award finalist; Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?, named a Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library; Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022); and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power, forthcoming in 2026, a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada, featuring art by Octavio Quintanilla. Cassells is …

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Reviews

“Cyrus Cassells… is considered one of the major voices of contemporary American poetry.” —Parade

“Cassells’s poems reiterate the need to experience romantic, erotic love as a gateway to spiritual love.” —American Bookseller

Beautiful Signor is magnificent, bright, freshly observed and sexy.” —Bay Windows

“[Beautiful Signor,] read in a sitting, is a crescendo of physical and spiritual ecstasy.” —Echo Magazine

“[The poetry] of Cyrus Cassells has a lush, velvety quality, with the aroma and mouthfeel of a well-aged red.” —Ken Furtado, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review

“In his third collection, Beautiful Signor, Cyrus Cassells continues to make the spiritual quest a dominant theme… Cassells is among the most gifted poets writing today and he seems to know exactly when to enhance his natural eloquence with a remarkable image.” —Hungry Mind Review

“[Beautiful Signor], a valentine for gay men, is a book I heartily welcome for its spiritual poetics enshrined in a music that joins heaven and earth.”—Timothy Liu, Lambda Book Report

“… [A] powerful and splendid volume…Cassells is a passionate poet whose poems touch the core of human connection.” —Library Journal, starred review