[st]utter in riddled chain-link [lim]it a body
an unstable [volt]age. dense [mus]cled [s]urge
thru muck dark & primal [b]lushed [bit]ter
mire or [f]lux in form, wing or [gi]zard, stem
in sprout, [sun]lit gimmick [bl]ossom or [g]litter
gash the wet sea open fin or fang pain [p]ried
loose a ridge or [sp]ine. tense [mus]ical
[sc]ales condensed syrinx from [sum]mer
[plum]age or graft, limb, teeth or tin, mem-
brane [shel]ter. I wake up in a city. humans
wake up in [ci]ties. in [fl]esh, [f]lash, vast,
[car]ve or [g]naw a niche, [gli]tch my [l]ove-
[s]ong this [ph]ylum in [s]kin or [king]dom in noise.
King//Dom
Cody-Rose Clevidence
Feature Date
- January 6, 2019
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Copyright © 2019 by Cody-Rose Clevidence.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
A glitchy trip through the poetics of the (un)natural, Flung Throne is a descent into and disassembly of language that rages and bursts apart before receding back into the earth. Emerging here is a poetics against the poetic, a reckoning of word and world. Prophetic, angry, but still reaching for light, Cody-Rose Clevidence notes of the work’s dark undercurrents, “. . . we, psychologically speaking, are ill-equipped to bear the throes of our own mental, social, and emotional neural chemistry. Our consciousness is a cruel trick the universe has played on the world/ourselves.” Awed and repulsed by humanity’s capacities— even that of a lyric gaze— Clevidence’s second collection distills writing to its phonemic essences and situates them in the kind of wilderness that overtakes abandoned parking lots when nobody is looking.
“Decisive and brave, the writings that rise, page after page, from this major book by Cody-Rose Clevidence return to us from the future, bearing traces of myth, shards of history, and some kind of protean promise whose terms are not yet realized— not yet, that is, unless (as I think is the case) they are realized here, in this magnificent (monstrous) book: Flung Throne. Clevidence has written a work of devastating negative that is a medium of creative joy. I celebrate its existence.
—Lyn Hejinian
“Cody-Rose is writing pages sung old, flung anew, lyrics dripped in endless nameless crystal countenance. They are village poet seeing hearing stars as visible resonance of shared glyph. Demons infect, graces play, a wildlife strategy of intuition, survival, identity and foreverness. With lamp and map Cody-Rose is writing out to startling territories, camouflaged, cutlass in teeth.
—Thurston Moore
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