Soul Make a Path Through Shouting

Cyrus Cassells

Soul Make A Path Through Shouting is Cyrus Cassell’s second book. His first, The Mud Actor, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Al Young in 1982. Enriched both mythologically and experientially by his world travels, Cassells makes the vital journey of his poetry inward, a search for spiritual grace drawing from Greek mythology, children’s rhymes, and African-American oral traditions. The result is an often hypnotic and rhapsodic interweaving of dramatic narratives forming a single whole.

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ISBN: 9781556590658

Format: Paperback

Sung from a Hospice

Still craving a robust
Tenderness and justice,
I will go on living
With all I have seen:
Young men lusterless;
Against my blind cheek—
Blessed be the frangible
And dying,
The irreplaceable dead—
In my crestfallen arms:
With breath,
Then without it,
With flesh,
Then freed of it—

And the indurate man I heard
Condemn the stricken,
While my cousin was dying,
If he had walked these wards,
Armorless, open
To the imperiled,
Surely he would have gleaned
To sit in judgment
Is to sit in hell—

Lesions, elegies,
Disconnected phones—

Rain, nimble rain,
Be anodyne,
Anoint me when I say outright:
In the plague time, my heart
Was tested,
My living soul
Struck like a tower bell,
Once, twice,
four times in a single season.

About the Author

A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Cyrus Cassells has also been a recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. He was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the AWP Poetry Prize, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and twice for the Balcones Prize (in 2012 and 2018) for Outstanding Book of the Year. His first book, The Mud …

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Reviews

“Cassells’s writing strikes a balance between exquisite language and an empathy for anyone who is forced to suffer… Like Pasternak, Cassells excels at merging a sleeping landscape with a moment of crisis.” —Publishers Weekly

“The most spectacular book I’ve seen in years.” —Rita Dove

“The language [in Soul Make a Path Through Shouting] is indeed exquisite, but is infused with a spirituality and compassion that lifts it far beyond the realm of aesthetic niceties.” —Martín Espada

“…A spectacular black and gay perspective on human tragedy.” —Feminist Bookstore News

“Unflinching in its examinations of the Holocaust and AIDS, remarkable in its challenge to preconceived notions of triumph and survival, this book is a virtuoso performance.” —Lambda Book Report

“Poet Cyrus Cassells’s verse is often deceptively delicious.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch