06/05/2026
and Regents' Professor Cyrus Cassells has published his eleventh book, LORCA TO THE UMPTEENTH POWER 🕊️Prof. Cassells is the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate 🪶
✨Cassells's new book of poetry is "a remarkable homage, in vibrant prose and poetry, to the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García 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." (link in comments)
✨“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
Graphic 1:📷Brenda Ladd 🖼️Octavio Quintanilla
Graphic 2:📷Cyrus Cassells (taken in Granada, Spain)
