By SIU Press
SIU Press title The Gospel according to Wild Indigo has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature in Poetry.
“Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, Cyrus Cassells’s sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family,” SIU Press says.
“Cassells’ language is always striking, unpredictable, and beautiful, conjuring a world not only of ‘placid seagulls perched / in priest-gentle pines / like festive Christmas ornaments’ but also one where ‘Death prevailed, / tireless as a forest partisan.’ His poems transport the reader across time, space, and language, searching constantly not just for empathy but also for the human spirit in its triumph, for ‘our human joy, / laced with an ageless grieving.'”
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The other nominees in this category:
* Confessions of a Barefaced Woman – Allison Elaine Joseph (Red Hen Press)
* Ghost, Like a Place – Iain Haley Pollock (Alice James Books)
* Refuse – Julian Randall (University of Pittsburgh Press)
* Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart – Alice Walker (Author) (37 Ink/Atria Books)
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Cassels is also scheduled to appear at the San Antonio Book Festival in April.
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See also, from HuffPost: 2017 Poetry Month: An Interview With Cyrus Cassells.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on February 20, 2019