JUDITH ROITMAN Reviews
Perverse, All Monstrous by Cody-Rose Clevidence
(Nion Editions, 2017)
Cody-Rose Clevidence dissolves boundaries: language, gender,
species, self/other.
[st]utter
in riddled chain-link [limi]it a body
an unstable
[volt]age. dense [mus[cled [s]urge
thru muck dark and primal…
begins the first page, titled KING//DOM
followed by (followed!?! by) the book’s epigraph, from
Milton’s Paradise Lost:
“… Where
all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse,
all mountrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable,
unutterable, and worse…”
followed by a piece labeled [AGATE/ALGAE] with strings of
dots arranged and thickening into letters, syllables, vertical and other lines,
gradually cohering into clusters of words ending with
:;proto-eye
::;.;;:.opened in::;an:;.::;;ocean;::;;:::zZ::;|:|>:||:;::sss::;::X:;;;
followed by single letters then double letters then
gradually after many lines
them
sudden them sunlit shores ripe or be reaped by thee
We are re-enacting evolution, pushing at the limits, using
language in its farthest reaches, its richest speech
speak,
rock. like a bad tongue, ugly in the mouth of the world.
speak,
first nerve, first chord, now-cold sea
seed in
lack blooms by the grey shore first signs
and sparest restraint
cyst distal try
cryst Dis umph
al Troy !
Pages of capital letters, strange typographies, even
CTRL+ALT+ESC
because why not? Clevidence inhabits the body, their body,
all bodies, their work (e.g., the earlier Beast
Feast) intensely deeply physical; they inhabit language, lose themselves
and us in language — who else w/could write “lapse and lithospheric strum in
skin”? And on and on. Do I adore this book? Yes.
It is available from Nion Editions, founded by Jane Gregory,
Lynn Hejinian, and Claire Marie Stancek. Perverse,
All Montrous comes as a slender hardback wrapped with a small wrapper, a
handmade piece of art by one of the press’ founders, the artist not identified.
*****
Judith Roitman has most recently published in december,
Rogue Agent, E.Ratio, The Writing Disorder, Otoliths, Eleven Eleven, Horse Less
Review, Talisman and Yew. Her recent chapbooks include Slackline
(Hank’s Loose Gravel Press), Furnace Mountain (Omerta), Ku: a thumb
book (Airfoil Press) and Two: ghazals (Horse Less Press). Her book No
Face: Selected and New Poems (First Intensity) appeared in 2008. Her book Roswell (theenk Books) is scheduled to appear later this
year (2018). She lives in Lawrence, KS.