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.

ISBN: 9781556590658

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

“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