Flung Throne

“I ache, I arc, I archaic, I arch, I eon, Ion, &on,” writes Clevidence (Beast Feast) in their sophomore effort, a dense but rich exploration of the continuum between person and nature. Like Clevidence’s debut, this work both subverts and takes pleasure in the conventions of English, searching for what, if anything, constitutes a particular being separate from others. But where earlier poems trafficked in the language of critical theory and computing as well as the natural world, this outing is interested in metals, monarchies, and mythologies—the book’s reference to Chronos eating a stone, thinking it was his son Zeus, is particularly instructive in the ways kinships might be surprisingly malleable. When the work’s formal strangeness balances with equally dense meanings, Clevidence creates exquisite experiences; one passage asks readers to “let x stand for civilization, as in xylophone and xenon; let y be distance: yet, yes, yellow; let lust be time and crumble cities, let a mirror mimic sensation, there are eyes.” This is a long work, and at times its organization can feel arbitrary, as if one might have begun reading anywhere. But that, perhaps, is part of the point in a book obsessed with how form “is restless within itself,” with the way a shore can be “made of new rocks.” (May)