Reading Cody Draco’s Spirit of the Cowboy feels like stepping into an open field at dusk—haunted, beautiful, and filled with echoes you’re not sure are ghosts or memories. This is not a book that behaves politely; it confronts, it stares back, and it insists that identity is not something inherited but something forged with fire, sweat, and language.

Draco draws from American archetypes—the cowboy, the preacher, the city, the frontier—and reshapes them into metaphors of selfhood and struggle. What is fascinating is how these familiar symbols are not discarded but interrogated. A cowboy is not just a cowboy; he becomes a mirror of desire, fear, repression, and liberation. Neuroscientists tell us that memory is less like a photograph and more like a constantly rewritten script. Draco’s poems embody this truth, revisiting past encounters with fresh angles until the ghosts reveal more about the speaker than the past itself.

There’s an undercurrent of social critique that runs as strong as a river beneath the imagery. The poems name America’s contradictions: worship of guns, commodified politics, erased histories, systemic inequities. Yet rather than descending into cynicism, the voice carries a strange kind of hope—hope born not of naivety but of refusal to remain silent. The lines burn with the belief that speaking, even raw and messy, reshapes the cultural conversation.

Readers who have ever felt confined by expectations of who they should be—be it because of gender, family, community, or nation—will find a companion in this book. It’s not a comfortable companion, but a necessary one, like a friend who tells you hard truths you secretly needed to hear. Those who prefer poetry that tiptoes around difficult realities may find the work unsettling. But perhaps unsettling is exactly the point.

Draco’s artistry lies not just in content but in craft. The rhythm often mirrors conversation, rant, or confession, making the poems feel alive, urgent, and intimate. Sometimes they read like sermons, other times like diary entries, and at moments like protest chants scrawled on the walls of America itself. There are flashes of surreal imagery and lyrical tenderness that catch the reader off guard, balancing the sharper critiques.

Imagine being told all your life that masculinity looks a certain way, only to realize that version was a costume stitched together by generations. This book is what happens when someone tears the costume apart and weaves something new from the scraps. That weaving is not seamless, but that’s the beauty of it—threads fray, knots show, and the fabric breathes.

Who is this book for? It’s for the wanderers who look at cultural myths and feel both awe and alienation. For those who know poetry is not an escape from reality but a way of entering it more deeply. It is not for readers seeking rhymed pleasantries or pastoral nostalgia.

In the end, Spirit of the Cowboy asks: what does it mean to inherit a history that doesn’t fit, and what does it cost to rewrite it? The answers are not easy, but the asking is everything.

Cody Draco’s Spirit of the Cowboy is a bold, genre-defying collection that fuses queer identity, Southern grit, and cultural critique into poetry that cuts and confesses in equal measure.

Writing from the shadow of Kentucky’s expectations and through the lens of queerness forged in a deeply gendered world, Draco takes on everything from internalized shame to national amnesia, from lost love to political fury.

Standout pieces like “Ballad of a Backwoods Preacher” and “Ghosts of the Past” echo with questions of faith, repression, and what’s left when masculinity collapses. There are nods to Whitman and Ginsberg, but Draco’s voice is very much his own—sharp, skeptical, wounded, and still hopeful.

There’s beauty here, and sorrow, and anger. The kind of anger that’s personal, political, and deeply American. And yet the collection ends on a more tender note, reaching toward connection and something like peace.

A strong collection, and one that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in queer literature, contemporary poetry, or the emotional wreckage of the modern American myth.

To call Spirit of the Cowboy a poetry collection feels almost insufficient, because Cody Draco’s work does not sit quietly between two covers. It presses outward, restless, like a living thing. The poems walk dusty highways, slip into neon-lit cities, and collapse into motel rooms where memory and desire blur. They do not simply describe; they demand the reader feel the texture of shame, the heat of longing, the ache of history. In this sense, the book operates less like a collection of separate pieces and more like a terrain to be traversed, where every step is uneven and every shadow holds both pain and possibility.

What gives the book its force is how it merges the personal with the collective. Draco’s voice is undeniably rooted in queer experience, yet the echoes of national myths—cowboys, pulpits, wars, highways—make it larger than one life. The American dream appears not as a shining promise but as a shifting mirage, one the poet both yearns for and dismantles. The poems are haunted by cultural artifacts—Springsteen cassettes, roadside snacks, news cycles—and yet none of these remain untouched. They are broken down, interrogated, and reassembled until their new shapes reveal uncomfortable truths.

Reading these pieces feels similar to overhearing a stranger’s confession on a long bus ride: intimate, raw, unfiltered, but also strangely universal. There is a rhythm to the lines that makes them sound spoken rather than written, as if Draco is leaning across a table, telling you things he can’t tell anyone else. But every so often, the voice turns prophetic, pulling you out of intimacy and into the sweep of history, pointing at the fractures beneath the nation’s surface. It is this oscillation between private confession and public reckoning that gives the book its unique energy.

It is worth noting that these poems are not easy companions. They tackle topics many shy away from—guns as symbols of attachment, faith turned into hypocrisy, queerness forged in environments hostile to it. There is humor, sometimes dark, but there is little cushioning. For some readers, that unflinching honesty may feel like an invitation; for others, it may feel like a challenge. Yet even when the language stings, the presence of vulnerability grounds it in something undeniably human.

What lingers most after the last page is not despair but persistence. The speaker knows loss, shame, and violence, but still insists on creating, speaking, naming. There is an implicit argument here—that poetry is not just ornament but survival. Neuroscience suggests that memory is reshaped every time it is recalled, and Draco’s poems embody that principle: the past is re-remembered until it becomes a map toward a different kind of future.

This is not a book for those seeking quiet contemplation or gentle landscapes. It is for readers who are unafraid to confront contradictions head-on, who understand that beauty often hides in jagged places. Spirit of the Cowboy refuses to fit neatly in tradition’s saddle. Instead, it rides off, kicking up dust, leaving the reader breathless in its wake.

Too often, the cowboy ethos has embraced the most toxic of masculine identities, but Florida poet/musician Cody Draco seeks a kinder, gentler cowpoke, if such a being actually exists.

His mission is clear from the outset. The first two poems address the dichotomy in terms both personal (the titular “Spirit of the Cowboy”) and geographic (“A City Only Knows Itself”).

Draco is an excellent poet who uses sharp contrast and well-defined images to convey his points not only about the schism between city and rural lives but also about the state of the country in general (“America Needs a Heart Attack” and “Alzheimer’s Is an American Tradition”).

He never strays far, however, from the personal, as in one of my favorites here, “Broken Crayon Theory”: boys who break crayons survive their childhood/their hands are strong/their grip is firm/inherently masculine/they tend to leave behind victims/due to their careless decision/to endorse their own rage... By turns obvious and subtle, these well-observed pieces are sure to make you think as well as feel.