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Lorca to the Umpteenth Power
Fourteen years in the making, Cyrus Cassells’s eleventh book, Lorca to the Umpteenth Power, is a remarkable homage, in vibrant prose and poetry, to the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), who was brutally assassinated at the outset of the Spanish Civil War—a crime that shocked the literary world, as Lorca’ s book, Gypsy Ballads, was the first ever poetry bestseller in Spanish history. In lush, reverent poetry and ready-to-roll vignettes that detail Cassells’s five pilgrimages to Granada between 1984 and 2019, Cassells explores, in profoundly empathetic and imaginative fashion, the lasting power of Lorca’s indelible poetic and theatrical creations. Lorca’s famous insistence on the importance of mystery in multiple aspects of life and the key concept of duende, the puissant spirit that possesses risk-defying musicians and applauded performers, are major motifs in Cassells’s dynamic tribute, which is enriched by evocative, engaging art from Texas Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla. This is a book of sacred affinities, a compelling paean and dialogue across time and space.
“Only mystery allows us to live,” wrote Federico García Lorca. Friendship is a mystery, as is the erotic charge between two bodies, as is poetic affinity across time and space and language. Cyrus Cassells’s Lorca to the Umpteenth Power plumbs all of these enigmas, revelling in them. His poems and prose vignettes are a prismatic act of “gratitude / for my partaking,” a rich and passionate homage to Lorca: “my poet of blood and quicksilver, / of nard and moonlight—a sentient arrow / piercing me.” This book, a multi-decade journey, is a testament to both poets’ vitality, curiosity, and ardent openness to “mystery’s / warrens and arabesques.”
—Robin Myers, poet and translator of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara‘s We Are Green and Trembling, winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Cyrus Cassells’s hybrid work, Lorca to the Umpteenth Power, shows us what it means to truly love another poet from another time, what it means to feel a connection with another poet’s spirit and soul. In Cassells’s correspondence with Lorca and Lorca’s ghost, however, Cassells’s own voice shines through. Cassells is a lyric poet, and as he writes, “A poet is a grieving lover, an elegist / for all he sees–…” The visions in Cassells’s mind are Lorca’s poems, plays, landscapes, and biography. Cassells has not only brought these visions to life, but also articulated what it means to be changed by another mind.
—Victoria Chang, author of OBIT and With My Back to the World
In a time of dictators, Cassells’s masterful lyrics and inventive memoir come to us like a restorative wind, affirming the life-force through the book’s beauty and poetic freedom. Haunted by Federico García Lorca’s brutal assassination, Cassells journeys through the gardens, neighborhoods, and rocky places where the Spanish poet’s spirit still resides. Interwoven with love lyrics that bring the immediacy of earthly pleasure to life, there is a resistance here that emerges from the sheer joy of the lines. Cassells’s homage to Lorca reminds us at every turn of Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz’s famous lines: “The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born…” Lorca to the Umpteenth Power affirms that, in the face of everything, the poet’s voice endures, as does, despite the world’s sorrows, the human spirit.
—Ellen Hinsey, Yale Younger poet, translator, and author of The White Fire of Time, The Illegal Age, and Anatomy of the Eclipse
The 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas, Cyrus Cassells is the author of ten previous books of poems. Among his honors: the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize; a Civitella-Ranieri Foundation fellowship; a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship; a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship; the National Poetry Series; and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. The World That the Shooter Left Us was a Housatonic Book Award finalist and The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award, and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. Cassells was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his film and television reviews in The Washington Spectator. He teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University, where he is a Regents’ Professor and University Distinguished Professor of English and winner of a Presidential Award—the university’s three highest honors.
