June 5th, 2026 — Happy Publication Day to Cyrus Cassells’ (CRF 2023) new book, Lorca to the Umpteenth Power (3: A Taos Press). Released on Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca’s birthday! The hybrid work features art by current Texas Poet Laureate, Octavio Quintanilla, and the title poem won a Pushcart Prize last year.
About the Book
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.
Praise for the Book
Incoming Fellow Victoria Chang writes,
“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 (CRF 2026)
Complimenti, Cyrus!