Beast Feast
Cody-Rose Clevidence. Ahsahta (SPD, dist.), $18 trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-1-934103-53-1
Clevidence, an Iowa Writers Workshop graduate who now lives in a cabin in Arkansas, wants to show both how thickly the discourse around us (about bodies, about money and gender, about space and time) holds us in its deadening, deafening grip, and how strongly and strangely and beautifully the body that Clevidence imagines can try to get free. “[W]hat limp or bare-backed bare-boned regalia is a throwback to a whip, crown, death-church,” the poet asks, “is the flash flood a call to arms against an ocean?” Clevidence (who goes by the pronoun “they”) draws on recent sexually explicit eco-poetry as well as on Shakespeare and on the DC Comics character Swamp Thing, who may be the key to the whole volume.
Clevidence’s strangest pages have no obvious precedent: they are columns of almost unreadable manifesto, arranged like characters on ancient scrolls, without word breaks, so that we have to slow waaaay down, and to disregard non-alphanumeric detritus, in order to even begin to read them. Only this kind of weird self-conscious process, Clevidence suggests, can help us question our deepest bourgeois assumptions and short-circuit our inner censoriousness. One of the columnar poems depicts “thef/ ORESTickT/ Hick::WOLF/ Fhunt{edF/ OX{}” among “swalL/OW.asPs.” We have to work to visualize such things, and that’s part of the point. Some pages look like screen captures, or like server errors—the language of computer programming (“VERB/ ATIM PURL... & BUILT”) zaps and muscles its way amid the language of poems. “Queerne/ssnecessi/ tatesarad/ icalizedl/ anguage,” Clevidence also declares, and for most of their volume, that radical language arrives. Readers who like a challenge should be ready to dig in. (Sept.)
Reviewed on: 08/18/2014
Genre: Fiction