Set among blue Ozark creeks, hoods of trucks, and changing constellations, Cody-Rose Clevidence’s poems call up embodied sensations as they arise, with love and anguish, in a specific place. Navigating between senses and the sensed world, in lyric lushness and density, Clevidence constructs an intricate and playful poetics both experimental and emotive to investigate the interplay between the vivid sensations of the body and the viscerally surrounding world.
Reviews
Clevidence’s new triptych is nothing short of a magnum opus.
The luminous fourth book from Clevidence takes a demonstrated interest in gaps and redaction.
Aux Arc Trypt Ich is a sensory experience. It is filled with color and taste, the smell of the damp, dark earth, but also of the stars and the bitter of berries ripened in the shade. It is the smell of dew on the grass and a thunderstorm brewing, baptizing the land in lightning.
The poems of Aux/Arc Trypt Ich, one of two volumes Clevidence published in 2021, are shot through with a sense of nature’s vitality and with the possibility that the numinous, even the divine, may inhere in that nature — and especially in nature’s generative processes
Clevidence invites us in deeper to the complications of which we ourselves are a part, to participate in the tangle, knowing there is no other way, save by the lovely irritation of the world itself, to gain the great pearl.
Rather than what we might typically expect from an avant-garde poet who spends most of their time in the woods, these poems could best be described as post-ecological, poems that—aware beyond all of their lyrical-ness, often distrustful of it, even—take into account the genealogical current running through poetry’s entire pastoral history and, literally, dig for a better access to the sublime
Aux Arc Trypt Ich—a lyric triptych exploring body and desire as inextricably enmeshed with Arkansas—is an astonishing work of experimental ecopoetics, embodied and embodying in creek, rut, flatulence, moss, mercy, cum, baptism.
There is such a magnificence and heft to Clevidence’s epic, book-length lyric, one that staggers, overlays, staccatos, flips and twists across an assemblage-suite of poems long and short that fit together perfectly.
Clevidence is a poet fully in tune with the human condition to which any reader might feel called, if one only takes the time to absorb the dizzying waterfall of language they present.
In this episode, Commonplace Producer, writer, and editor Valentine Conaty speaks to poet Cody-Rose Clevidence. The two discuss attention, collective movements of feeling, media consumption, connectedness, favorite memes, loneliness, the human yearning for divinity, reclaiming God for depressed queers, being a good family member, science-y books, and reading widely as a poet.
In this episode, I spoke with Cody-Rose Clevidence about their latest publication, Aux Arc / Trypt Ich, out with Nightboat Books. We dug into language, exploring motif, grief, love—all that good stuff.
AUX ARC TRYPT ICH featured in Lambda’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books!
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