The Devil's Workshop

Author: Xavier Cavazos

Publisher: Cleveland State University Press (2023)

A demonic excavation of self and world, The Devil's Workshop finds its lifeblood in the throes of exorcism, modeling an antidote to the paths of redemption and respectability politics. Performed by the mother figure who speaks in tongues, spiritual purge becomes synonymous with writing when it renders the poet’s body “amplified and released,” disintegrating the very word in lines that blow up in the middle of the book. If it is a relief to get lost in Xavier Cavazos’ drug-fueled hauntings—to wander through his meditations on race, sex, and Gringolandia—it is because I am starved for poetry this full-throated and blasphemously aware.  

—Lucas De Lima

Cavazos’ super-poet power is the ability to hold all the shapes a mind and heart can inhabit—from fantastic to frightening, loving to longing, nightmare to dream. The poems in The Devil’s Workshop move like restless octopuses—casting lines across pages then squeezing through a crack of light—letter by letter, drop by drop. This book is at once a dance, a swan dive, a eulogy, and a séance calling the Spirits of Multi-perversions back home again. 

—Jennifer L. Knox