The Rendering

by Anthony Cody

A poetry collection that considers climate change and the possibility of wholeness within the Anthropocene.
 
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.
 

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

Published May 6, 2023

Reviews

[Noam Levinsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A farmer adjusts the radio / knob, again. Static glow." (18) This is perhaps my favorite of the fragments presented in this book, an archive of a Great Plains plantationocene, interweaving historical material into the contemporary. I'm not huge on the visual poem. And I'm not huge on the fragmentary poem that is purposely hard to read. But Cody won me over with this collection. My reading experience was that of an alien anthropologist coming to Earth in 2,000 years and finding a collection of midwestern artifacts buried in the crumbling ruins of a library (this is sort of cliché, and clearly not the intention of the text, but I still think it is cool).

The poems here form "a map of all the places you have been but can never return to" (70), an alienating and estranged terrain that was once home, but his somehow known: "The cartographer speaks in eons and sees the owner's effort to provide direction and is sad" (71)

"They forgot / how to perch, slept in fields, blocked / the roads so The Leavers could not / leave for fear of flattening" (83). Cody's poetics are those of amnesia, a yearning to remember a place as it once existed. By the end of the collection he is left with a "Basilica of Dust. / stands / over the built / over / the transfigured." (29). His fragements are dispersed like the dust of the earth. The joy of reading this book is reconstructing them: "Dhydrtn brngs th vsn // Bynd th wndw / Pn f ll rds tht hv frkd"

[krissy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read started to read the book, I didn’t feel a strong connection. The Dust Bowl was one of those things my teachers kind of brushed over, and I didn’t really learn much about it outside of the iconic photographs from the time. However, the more I read it, I saw the connections Cody was making between religion and expansion, being complicit and being actively harmful to the planet, and it started to strike a chord.

I was luckily enough to hear him read from this book, and it really made the experience that much more. It’s a beautiful book, and it while it can be hard to get into, it’s definitely worth it.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another stellar offering from Cody.

[Isabelle✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The visual poems are some of the best I've seen! So complex. Wish I asked him to sign my book...