Backed into corners by their oppressors, the victimized have few options. Weakened, wounded, stricken with fear, many lack the strength or will to resist. Others, however, bare their teeth and fight despite the odds against them. Cyrus Cassells’ newest collection of poems, The World That the Shooter Left Us, brings to mind just such ferocity and courage.
These are poems that rage against injustice with both sustained fury and consummate craft. An agile imagination and sharpness of diction are propelled by a deft control of sound. The heightened pitch of his assertions is sustained by words that snarl, hiss, and spit. Take, for example, these stanzas from “The Hood”:
You raise a rum-flecked pillow
To ward off the predictable blows
From your dashing,
Dish-breaking,
Back from country Dad
& damned if he doesn’t
Scissor the homespun pillowcase
Just to dub you a new Casper —
Here Cassells varies meter and line length to emphasize aggression, and pounding alliteration drives the point home. Subtle assonance and carefully placed internal rhyme carry the reader along in a verbal current that suddenly smashes against plosives evoking dominance and oppression, the intransigent obstacles to justice.
A profusion of hyphenated compound words is another distinguishing trait of his work. Examples include “seldom-cop-safe children” and “love-it-or-leave-it senators” from the poem “Sin-Eater, Beware” and “broadcast-to-the-hilt ruse” and “real-as-your-mama’s-dying-hand / Pandemic” from “The Only Way to Fight the Plague Is Decency.” These long, linked descriptors yank the reader out of the usual cyclical conversations and add urgency to the call for reckoning. Rather than oblique imagery or vague metaphor, Cassells uses impassioned accusation and barbed language flung with the force of impatience. These poems are volcanic eruptions uttered by a speaker pushed past the limits of containment.
Cassells distills personal and collective grief into poems that force the reader to see terrible and heartbreaking sights. “Don’t turn away!” enjoins an italicized voice in “Requiem for Óscar and Valeria: The Crossing,” a poem of unrhymed couplets that concludes in a stanza consisting of a single line. That last solitary line ends with a dash, abruptly leaving the reader with the image of two bodies, the father and “His topaz-like girl still / Wrapped in his buffeted, ink-dark tank top” lifeless on the banks of the Rio Grande. The anguish in the speaker’s voice and the moving depiction of this “luckless” father’s desperate plight would inspire compassion in the most cold-hearted reader.
“Icebox,” a poem in six parts that speaks in solidarity with unheard voices, depicts the callous atrocities at the American border, cruelties that traumatize and sometimes kill refugees and migrant children. Deviating from the usual couplets, the section titled “III. Those ‘Return to Senders’ Children” is an acerbic prose poem describing the children’s inhumane treatment:
gospel & righteous directive, sprayed with a winnowing hose at the
sacrosanct border slapped seized tear-gassed caged shunted to ex-
internment camps holding pens sally ports forbidden to hug herded
under fusty bridges handled with machine-swift severity & clarity
to professionals ogres sleepwalkers ill-equipped teens gangs gruff
border police ambitious privateers yes even wily traffickers lust-filled
clients, maybe over a thousand illegal children — oops! — like so many
stamped but still dust-strewn packages the careworn postman mislaid
Exclamation points pop up throughout the book, both in titles and within poems. Since this form of punctuation is relatively rare in poetry, Cassells’s frequent use of exclamation points attracted and held my attention. They skillfully help to accomplish a number of tasks. They resonate as shouts of acclaim and reverberate as caustic call-outs. They proliferate in poems featuring a youthful persona, an inclusion that vividly increases verisimilitude. They also reflect the American penchant for sensationalizing tragedy. News flash! OMG how awful! What shocking thing will happen next? The point taken here is how shallow fascination and sanctimonious thoughts and prayers merely perpetuate the cycle of violence. Cassells’s exclamation points electrify the poems and jab at the status quo.
Cassells invokes biblical allusions to highlight hypocrisy in America, a country some refer to as a “Christian Nation.” In reference to the Judgement of King Solomon, “The Mother Who Says Yes to the Sword” is a scathing indictment of those complicit in the victimization of children. This poem is located in the section of the book I found most compelling, “Boys Don’t Do That to Other Boys,” a group of six poems that confronts the turpitude of sexual exploitation and excoriates the perpetrators of sexual violence.
Another poem constructed on a biblical framework, “Like Christ Overturning the Moneylenders’ Tables” calls for the “Hard-chasing journalist” to bear witness to truth:
Keep ferreting, disclosing, demanding
What’s true, dauntless reporter & immanent,
In a time of subterfuge & delusion,
Of unerring rubber bullets
& brutally demolished cameras,
When two & two are tantamount to five
“Courage Song for Scott Warren,” the book’s last poem, is dedicated to the border activist whose commitment to humanitarian aid has three times resulted in his arrest and acquittal. It contains these lines of advocacy:
Bring your rebellious grit,
Like a bromide or a borderland candle,
To our bigotry-is-commonplace republic’s
Chaos. Bold anima, dissenting angel,
Among the betraying cliffs & dry washes,
The yellow plumes of the palo verde,
Be runagate Harriet in a midnight cane field
(General Tubman!), be Martin bravely writing
In an abysmal Birmingham jail …
Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Scott Warren, truth-seeking journalists, and other heroic figures step forth from the poems as models of action and courage. The reader is offered the choice: emulate them or turn away.
The World That the Shooter Left Us is a book of extraordinary intensity. The cumulative effect of these poems — with all their shocking insights, horrific betrayals, and devastating anguish — is invigorating rather than crushing. The power inherent in the syntax, sound composition, and imagery wrought by Cassells inspires resistance and reform.
[Published by Four Way Books on February 15, 2021, 120 pages, $16.95 paperback]