About this Event
Please join us as The Book of Light Poetry Series celebrates this year’s Jackson Poetry Prize winner Cyrus Cassells reading and signing copies of his award winning collection, Everything in Life is Resurrection: New and Selected Poems.
Drawn from eight acclaimed books of poetry and spanning forty years, Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022, is 2021 Texas Poet Laureate Cyrus Cassells’s long-awaited retrospective volume. Ellen Hinsey, in her compelling introduction, “A Lyric Poet in Dark Times,” heralds Cassells as “America’s foremost lyric poet, who, under the pressure of adverse circumstances, has turned from his home in music to unflinchingly face the blood and havoc of his era's civil sphere.”
Hinsey makes revealing comparisons with Yeats’s trajectory from high lyricism to poems of lament and Irish Civil War witness: “when we read Cassells’s work over the last four decades, we are aware that the music he hears is intrinsically intertwined with the noise of the world’s destruction.”
In addition, Hinsey lauds Cassells’s always riveting language “characterized throughout by a highly visual and expressive vocabulary, one touched by the grandeur of Shakespeare and the authority of the King James Bible.
There is a love of verb and noun, a richness of consonance and assonance, and a voluptuousness that makes a feast of description.”
Mark Doty has said: “The astonishing lyric fabric of Cassells’s work is weighted, as true lyrics of the earth must be, with the sorrow and cruelty of history. The sparkle of light on waves, the ‘foam and fish-scale blue’ of wild indigo can only be sung honestly beside the memory of the Middle Passage.
One side of the song doesn’t cancel out the other; they are held, in Cassells’s sweeping oratorios, side by side.”
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. Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way: 2024); Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022 (TCU Press: 2025), and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power (3: A Taos Press: 2026), a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada, featuring art by Octavio Quintanilla. Cassells is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (Stephen F. Austin State University Press: 2019); and To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin: 2023). Both volumes garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. The Man with the Oar on His Shoulder: Poems of Francesc Parcerias (Stephen F. Austin: 2026) recently received, in manuscript, Honorable Mention for the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation. Cassells’s honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, the National Poetry Series, two NEA grants, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Books Inc., 1344 Park Street, Alameda, United States
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