Fear comes easy, these days.

Smoldering on the news, seeping beneath casual conversations, permeating countless households and communities across the country. For me, this is a time of anger, as well as fear. Norms and institutions are eroding, specters of danger and uncertainty hanging over each day. Our long-familiar American crises—gun violence, environmental devastation, racism, war—are compounded, perpetuated, profited from. I find myself boiling with fury at all the injustices We the People not only tolerate, but seek. Anger and fear—those seductive, exhausting narcotics. I want to sing of hope, instead. Of future and love and renewal. But to believe in those stories without looking away from the sheer atrocities of our world sometimes feels impossible. The search for joy can look a lot like blindness. Without it, though, what is the point of anything else?

The same perennial tension resounds throughout Cyrus Cassells’ retrospective collection, Everything in Life Is Resurrection. In one poem, he prays, “And if the news of the human brings me / only terror, / if the news of the human / is only havoc?” The implicit question—what then?—receives no obvious answer. Yet throughout his meticulous, unflinching exploration of violence, his interrogation of “the heart’s carnage,” Cassells reveals a kind of reconciliation. He seeks, uncovers, and cherishes kindness, too. He conjures scenes of wonder. He braids injustice and hope into one searing, lyrical cry of life.

Published in March, the book spans Cassells’ long and acclaimed career. The Texas Poet Laureate’s work is arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with selections from The World That the Shooter Left Us (2022) and moving backwards, across eight books and forty years, to The Mud Actor (1982). The reading that emerges is archaeological, retracing the path of the world and the poet both. Cassells’ more recent poems are shaped more by form, most often in crisp couplets. The language in his older poems is sometimes less distilled, still discovering itself. But as we step back in time with Cassells, his ongoing conversation with tragedy, with beauty, shines as a throughline, a life’s work.

In her introduction to Everything in Life Is Resurrection, the poet and essayist Ellen Hinsey calls Cassells “America’s foremost lyric poet”. Although the definition of lyric poetry is contested and elusive, it is generally characterized by acrobatic feats of speaker and address, which indeed feature prominently in Cassells’ work. In his poems, there are usually four parties: the poet, the speaking I, the reader, and the addressed you. In most conventional poetry, the former two and latter two overlap. But lyric is a different dance. It may be overheard, imperative, even fictitious in the strictest sense. Throughout this collection, Cassells does seem to speak frequently as himself—but he also slips across boundaries and time, at once playful and somber, adopting the voices of slaves, of Holocaust survivors, of a child killed in the bombing of Hiroshima. Likewise does the you in his poems shift, intimately and deliberately: the reader, god, remembered lovers, civil rights activists, the author’s mother as cremated ashes “forever / ministering wind and turquoise”. The first poem of the collection addresses a crowd, perhaps the entire country, evoking a lawyer’s appeal to a jury:

In this one, ladies and gentlemen,

Beware, be clear: the brown man,

The able lawyer, the paterfamilias,

Never makes it out of the poem alive:

The rash, all-too-daily report,

The out-of-the-blue bullet

Blithely shatters our treasured

Legal eagle’s bones and flesh—

The lyric transitions produce a vertiginous uncertainty in each poem: Who are we? Who is speaking, and who listening? They allow Cassells to plunge us with equal suddenness into the raging currents of horror or the luminous interplay of color and love. We are brought to the concentration camp, “before the once-wolfish ovens, / the desecrating wall / where you were shot”. We are met in “spectrumed love,” told by the speaker that “I find in you / the ocher and gold, / the lustrous, silvery green / of the olive fields above Assisi.”

Cassells’ direct address, his lyric confidence is underlied by a musical devotion to language itself. He writes: “Listen, on my tenth birthday, I was taught, / By my assiduous pilot father, / The sundial’s impetus, / The red-hot equator’s pivotal role”. His repeated instruction, Listen, should be taken literally. Listen—the delighted sibilance of assiduous and impetus. The speaker’s indulgently intricate lexicon, reveling in diction itself; the same poem includes words like mendicant, rictus, and provender. Language, for Cassells, is far more than a mere means of confronting brutality. Instead, it is itself a partial answer to the impossible breadth of life, the glorious and the unspeakable. It is the mending, the collection’s eponymous act of resurrection. In POEM FOR THE ARTISTS OF THE HOLOCAUST, Cassells describes the desperate need for this act of repair: “And still the soul craves to make bridgeable / The space between the careworn / And the dead, / Craves never to quit the embattled earth / Unrecorded”.

To this craving, poetry is at once the bridge, the space, and the record. Many of Cassells’ works indeed feel like memorials, epitaphs to the AIDS victims whose bodies were refused from funeral parlors—“fear,” he writes, “is the quickest contagion”—or to migrant children caged and molested in ICE facilities, or perhaps to the country itself, in which we find such daily familiarity with violence. To any of these, Cassells refuses easy answers, even the tempting simplicity of righteous condemnation. He does not dismiss the loss, the pain, the sense of seismic uncertainty; nor does he deny the beauty of the everyday, of love and sun and taste and touch. In his work, neither remains whole on its own. And though the poems were written across decades, they feel as timely now as ever. The struggle contained in Everything in Life Is Resurrection is the same as ours—to be here, in the time we have, through all of it. To never forget ourselves. To fight against cruelty and resist the ease of numbness.

I am still scared and furious. I am still uncertain. But I don’t know what to call that tenacious insistence on being, if not hope. What else is there? Ultimately, Cassells reminds me that it is

More terrible than the heart’s carnage,

to walk the road to paradise

as if the road were leprous,

to journey, immutable,

a flat-worlder, a trudging sleepwalker

in realms of jasmine…

in every season, an impassive

stranger on this earth.

Everything in Life Is Resurrection was published in March 2025, by TCU Press.

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