Overview of The Rendering

Through a series of experimental poems centered on ecology, Anthony Cody’s The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts on our current climate crisis, while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Cody encourages readers to participate in radical acts of refreshing and reimagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, and he invites us to reflect on what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current trajectory toward destruction.

These poems consider if wholeness, or a journey toward wholeness, can exist in the Anthropocene. And, if wholeness cannot exist in these times, we are invited to look at our lives and the world through and beyond annihilation.

Publisher: Omnidawn 

Publication date: April 4, 2023

Blurbs

A heat-stroked “dreamache,” The Rendering renders a digital dustbowl of land and data over the poet’s anger, over pages of apocalyptic eco-deterioration, over maps to the extinct and dying. Anthony Cody does to the poem what desert sun does to signage—cracks it open, peels it back, tears letters away to expose the blistered surface underneath. Drama, documentary, epic, and ekphrasis gather here to be shattered by Cody’s dynamic visual praxis and turbulent dread, smoking wreckage at a dead end of US “ancientfuture.” Certainly, I trust the poet who writes “the annihilation of anything is exhausting.” Even so, this bravura collection asserts that in recording destruction, Cody can make a stunning warning against it.

– Douglas Kearney –

 

“I confuse today near the Fresno Rescue Mission with 1939” writes Anthony Cody in The Rendering, a book that chronicles and prophesies a past/future, climate/capitalist apocalypse. With charts and photos, poll questions and couplets, erasures and digital verse reverb/erations, these poems push into and against the limits of the archive and the page itself. Cody will teach you new ways to read and conceive of the lyric as well as to feel history as both ever present and ever open to potential renovation. “Play the track, two times slow.” Cody tells us. “The layer of [PAUSE] is an unpaid echo in the mechanics of site, an elder gustmemory of afternoon.” More than a compilation of Dust Bowl photographs and Depression-era songs (although both form part of this assemblage), this is a recontextualization, a grand experiment and a great excavation. The Rendering is a fiercely original and wholly indispensable work.

– Susan Briante –

 

In The Rendering, Anthony Cody pays homage to Francisco X. Alarcón and Juan Felipe Herrera, two of our most important Latinx multilingual experimentalists who have pushed the poem into new visual and mystical territories. Yet Cody builds on what these brilliant artists have done by creating work that is so singular in its vision, that is impossible to classify or pin down, that is so beautifully complex and miraculous as it mines the histories of migration and settlement and property and seizure. Here cultural and environmental devastations and displacements are indexed and mapped to shape a narrative that is personal, communal, spiritual, lexical, lyrical, translational, material, multi-modal and off-the-page-virtual. This is mind blowing art for our past and future apocalypse.

– Daniel Borzutzky –

Praise for The Rendering

The startling visual and verbal recursions and reiterations throughout the collection are “a call toward wakefulness,” toward attention—to interstices and gaps in photographs and dreams, to monuments, land, and memories that glitch as even vowels go missing…

– Cindy Juyoung Ok, for POETRY’s Harriet Blog –