The passionate, sun-drenched poems of Cyrus Cassells’s Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? invite us into well rendered worlds of love, lust, and beauty. Though he writes in American English, Cassells is a European poet; though he writes in our time, Cassells is a nineteenth-century Romantic poet. Who else could write work so unapologetic in its appetites, so sexy and urbane at the same time? Here we see him at his best—brazen, erotic, confident, and full of verve. In this brilliant collection, Cassells is the “artful, persistent dreamer,” and reading his poems, we become one, too.
—Richie Hofmann, Author of A Hundred Lovers
Cyrus Cassells’s newest collection is a sensory and emotional ecstasy. These poems form a melodic, earthy, and vibrant orchestra, each one keenly tuned to a particular resonance of rapture or grief. Cassells enlists the heart, the body, various landscapes and geographies—from olive groves to oceans—as accompaniments, no, accomplices, to journeys through “the blood-red joy / of breathing.” Here is the music of defiant, delightful aliveness inviting us again and again into the being of our humanity, that reaches out to us—“you be the dancer.”
—Lauren K. Alleyne, Author of Difficult Fruit and Honeyfish and Executive Director, Furious Flower Poetry Center
Cyrus Cassells’s latest book best articulates a hunch I’ve always believed. In this collection, grief and desire are “cohorts in crime.” Through the mythic, ritualistic, and the pastoral; by way of transformation and transmogrification; under the aegis of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Federico García Lorca, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Hammer Horror, Batman, and French New Wave cinema, Cassells has built not simply a collection but an altar in praise of Longing and its pas de deux with long-legged Time—in the end, that greatest of heartbreakers.
—Tommye Blount, Author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue