The Rendering

"The Rendering by Cody returns to the central premise of his debut, Borderland Apocrypha: what seems like nature is not neutral, and supposedly unavoidable environmental disasters are not random." * Harriet Books *
"Cody’s haunting and experimental second collection draws on the legacy of the Dust Bowl to explore late capitalism and criticize the excesses of greed that characterize American history. . . .Using photos from Dorothea Lange, inverted text, and QR codes, Cody pushes readers to expand their understanding of text and meaning. . . . In this exciting work, history, imagination, criticism, and wonder share the page, modeling a new way of being in conversation with the world and a new way of reading such a conversation." * Publishers Weekly starred review *
"In the follow-up to his transcendent and widely celebrated 2020 debut Borderland Apocrypha, Cody builds on the shapeshifting 'snake poems' of the late Francisco X. Alarcón and arrives at a digital 'dust bowl' poetics reflecting the author’s mixed Anglo and Chicano heritage. The dazzling graphic and concrete sensibility of Borderland Apocrypha remains, yet here Cody intervenes upon photos, maps, charts, graphs, and field recordings, producing an autoethnographic score of settler (and displaced) histories." * The Latinx Project *
“In The Rendering, 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, author of The Performance of Becoming Human
“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. 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, author of Sho, winner of the 2022 International Griffin Poetry Prize
“'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, author of Defacing the Monument, winner of the 2021 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism