The World that the Shooter Left Us

Opening The World That the Shooter Left Us with Adrienne Rich’s poem “And Now” and her objective of trying to “survey our public space / as best I could,” Cyrus Cassells declares his own allegiance to a public-minded ideal for the book, his eighth collection. These poems describe various manifestations of state and individual wrongs, focusing on the “countless renegade cruelties” of the Trump administration—the “daily dosage / Of breathlessness and Black body counts”—but also detailing the brutal repercussions of past iniquities, from antebellum slave catchers to President Reagan’s murderous avoidance of the AIDS crisis to the disappearances of political opponents in Chile and Argentina.

“Decorum won’t do the trick,” the speaker says in “Senator, Where Is Your Voodoo Doll, Your Snare?” and indeed Cassells’ tone is often outraged, clotted with elaborate adjectives (“our bigotry-is-commonplace republic’s / Chaos,” “Eternally embracing & risk-taking father”) that seek to do justice to what the title poem calls “the brute, churning // Surfaces of the world.” Such outrage serves the civic aim of ameliorating public wrongs through witness and exposure, even when Cassells inhabits the rebarbative personas of corrupt politicians, of a high-school jock who sexually abused another boy, and of blithe people who defend themselves against racism by referring to their “Black friend.”

The best poems here express their civic impulse through the intimacy of personal relationships. “Tango with a Ghost” remembers the speaker’s first “novio” or boyfriend, an Argentine who disappeared during the Dirty War: “Fleet as Hermes, a lord-like shadow.” And the lovely “Clarinet” speaks in the voice of a Chilean mother who is creating an arpillera or patchwork quilt for her son disappeared by Pinochet’s forces:

Purgatory where I bend 
Over the burlap, 
Again & again,
To show the blunt, 
Disillusioning world

The smashed black bell 
Of your clarinet.