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.

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ISBN: 9781556591242

Format: Paperback

From the Theater of Wine

Suddenly we’re sons of Noah,
in biblical robes,
wielding showy censers
to start with pomp
a Rosh Hashanah preschool pageant.
When the whirling incense
clears from the open courtyard
of the old kabbala school,
and the small children have quelled
their raucous coughing,
barrels of ripeness are brought in,
and tin pans
brimming with the vineyards’ glory.
Soon Noah’s mightily confused,
mock intoxicated…

As you take a jesterly bow,
autumn sun glistens in the auburn
of your Old Testament wig.
And spry Noah is filling
the lush, tousled lap
of his lavish beard
with grapes.
And the barefoot children are learning
a fruit-breathed laughter,
as they stamp and savor the labor
in the jubilant lesson of wine.
 

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