Spirit of the Cowboy is a lean, bruising, often striking poetry collection about masculinity, queer desire, American mythology, and the psychic wreckage left behind when those forces grind against one another. Author Cody Draco takes the cowboy, that old national idol of hardness and freedom, and turns him into both a fantasy and a wound. Across poems that move from erotic memory to political indictment to self-invention, he keeps asking what kind of man can be made after the inherited script has already done its damage. The result is a book that feels restless and intimate at once, full of dust, shame, lust, rage, and a stubborn, searching hope.

I found the collection’s emotional candor very compelling. Draco doesn’t write about queer longing as something neat or safely resolved. In poems like “Spirit of the Cowboy,” “Spanish Moss,” and “Your Mouth Heading South,” desire comes tangled up with humiliation, danger, nostalgia, and genuine tenderness. That tension gives the book its pulse. I felt, again and again, that he was writing from inside a conflict rather than about it from a comfortable distance. Even when the language veers into confrontation, there’s a vulnerable human ache under it. The best poems understand that longing can make a person feel exalted and trapped in the same breath, and Draco is especially good at catching that paradox before it slips away.

I was also taken by how ambitiously the book tries to connect the personal to the national. Sometimes that reach is thrilling. “Guns Are Our Babies,” “Alzheimer’s is an American Tradition,” and “Ramblings of a Soapbox Prophet” show a poet trying to diagnose not just his own inheritance, but the country’s, and I admired the nerve of that. He has a real instinct for memorable phrasing, and when his voice locks in, it can feel serrated and luminous at the same time. There are moments when the rhetoric outpaces the poem, when declaration crowds out discovery. But even then, I never doubted the force behind it. The writing has conviction, and more importantly, an authentic heat.

Spirit of the Cowboy is a book about trying to speak oneself into being while staring down the dead weight of gender, religion, memory, and America itself. I found it raw, intelligent, and unexpectedly moving, especially when its bravado gave way to grief or yearning. I’d recommend this vivid collection most to readers who like contemporary poetry with teeth, readers interested in queer reimaginings of masculinity, and anyone drawn to work that would rather risk excess than settle for bland safety.

Pages: 43 | ISBN: 1300307544