About the Author:
CYRUS CASSELLS’s first book, The Mud Actor, was a 1982 National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Named as one of the Best Books of 1994 by Publishers Weekly, his second volume, Soul Make A Path Through Shouting, was also awarded the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and was a finalist for the Associated Writing Program Series Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize for outstanding book of the year. Beautiful Signor, his third collection, received a 1997 Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. His most recent book, Riders on the Back of Silence, is a novel in verse. He has been a recipient of the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award of the Academy of American Poets, a Pushcart Prize and Lannan Literary Award, among other honors. A graduate of Stanford University, Cassells is Associate Professor of English at Southwest Texas State University near Austin, Texas.
Review:
“A well-defined and confident debut by one of this year’s five winners in the National Poetry Series.” (Publishers Weekly)
“The Mud Actor finds its most powerful images in the poems of childhood and in the moving poem, ‘The Memory of Hiroshima’ . . . , Cassells’ ultimate testimony to the human spirit. The cumulative nature of the book is powerful, and allows us to agree with the poet at the end that ‘Everything in life is resurrection.” (Library Journal)
“. . . Black poets have panted for so long around the base of the Racial Mountain; only a few greats have seen the view from its summit. Most of us find the climb arduous, weighted down as we are by guilt, suspicion, and envy. . . . And here comes Cyrus Cassells bouncing down toward us, having descended, it seems, by parachute. How can such a young man have learned the ancestral wisdom? . . . an auspicious debut. . . .” (Marilyn Nelson, Callaloo)
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