Tiffany Troy reviews
Is There Room for Another Horse
on Your Horse Ranch?
by Cyrus Cassells

Cyrus Cassells’ Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch is a Dionysian ecstasy of remembrance and longing. I say “Dionysian” because the opening can be compared to the “Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun”  drawing you in to “go back” to a transatlantic dream, where the “conquest” is revelry and loss in sun-dappled European cities.

The collection begins by welcoming the “you” to “be the dancer,” of a union of “[b]ud-green Romeo & Romeo.” If green is traditionally the disdained color of marital unfaithfulness, Cassells turns that on its head by “recit[ing] passages of un-shy Sappho/ Or soothsaying Lorca’s enrapturing/ Gypsy ballad that begins: / Green, how I love you, green.” The green of the cypresses, of petty jealousies, of becoming a satyr in dance, where like Catullus before him, he does not shy away from self-praise with gusto, and in painting the beauty of the Romeo’s like Sappho.

Cassells’ speaker asks, “Can you worship a place?” The title of the collection comes from the speaker’s lover Serge-Antoine, who “whispered in alluring, accented English: Is there room for another horse / On your horse ranch?” As Cassells make clear, the horse ranch is the site of erotic intrigue between a “verse-sprouting lover, head to toe, / Never a harsh foe or a prickly fighter!” and his Romeos.

Cassells teaches us that you worship a place by “assembl[ing] all your lovers… With those you desired / But never touched, arrayed/ Like ancient Chinese clay guardsmen:/ Unearthed, unimpeded, / At-the-ready for your soul’s inspection…” The place, then, carries stories that are told through epithets of Cyrus’ construction and imagination, each reiteration another hue of the colors of “amethysts and pawnshop gold” and sounds of “bold-as-you-please accordions” that invariably end in an extra horse on the horse ranch of romantic love and smut. Cassells’ portmanteaus have a velocity that immerses his readers as their imagination to go rogue at the cavern in the nude beach, up the stairs of the puppeteer’s home.

What after all is home but the memories of people contained in it? Cassells holds his readers’ attention with “Up, up the unending steps” not to the wishy-washy idea of a form or an abstract, beyond the pale beloved, but physical steps as the speaker is carved as a puppet, and role playing as “dramatic, wheedling, a horse’s ass” . We follow the speaker’s escapades that re-write the fables, ending with “I Believe Icarus Was Not Failing as He Fell.” Instead of being forewarned at the risks of having taking the guise of waxwings too far, or warning against hubris, Cassells relishes in it.

I admire how the infatuation and sex are not a stand in for the abstract, and how the particulars lead to a redefinition of home for an errant traveler. I think the spoken of Ithaca is not a real space, but the memories of the eternal return similar to a return to a pre-war Catalonia in Salvador Espriu’s poetry. For Cassells, it is that moment of connection achieved through intense attraction, when the flute gives way to a deeper understanding of the self: “I love you, like wandering Odysseus’/ Revenant ship, / Reaches your allaying headlands, / Your longed-for Ithaca,/ Again and again.”

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert/ El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.

Cyrus Cassells was the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas. Among his honors: a 2023 Civitella-Ranieri Foundation fellowship; a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate fellowship to administer his statewide Juneteenth poetry project; a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship; the National Poetry Series; a Lambda Literary Award; two NEA grants; a Pushcart Prize; and the William Carlos Williams Award. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was 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. To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, combining translations, poetry, and memoir in homage to Catalan Spain’s most revered 20th century writer, was published in 2023. 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 received a 2021 Presidential Award for Scholarly/Creative Activities and was named a 2023 University Distinguished Professor.