New Release
FONO32 // Cody-Rose Clevidence — The Grimace of Eden, Now (print; hardback book)
$18.95
Release Date: December 17th, 2024
Description
The playful, inventive, and lyrically quick poems comprising The Grimace of Eden, Now orbit the strange space halfway between Tennyson and the Metaverse, veering between the natural world and a sci-fi universe, between inner feelings and outward observations, with questions of divinity alongside domestic life, spiders, dishes, and spaceships. The roving eye of these poems wanders through spacetime carrying irreverent theologies and exploring what it could mean to be living, sensate, and awake in this weird moment in time, exposing a mixture half of awe and half of madness.
About the Author
Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat Books, 2021), Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (The Song Cave, 2021), Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2018), and BEAST FEAST (Ahsahta Press, 2014), as well as several chapbooks (Fonograf Editions, flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). Occasionally a visiting poetry professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, they live in the Arkansas Ozarks alongside three loyal, sentient pets, and the continuous void.
Praise
“Adore and adorn: these are the primary imperatives for the cosmic poet, verbs of praise so
fundamental to poetic faith, they can hardly be told apart. Cody-Rose Clevidence, already one of our
country’s most potent lyric experimenters, heeds the imperatives of poetry’s archaic inclinations, for
they know the “ancient rhythm beats in your small heart today.” The music of a poem is its own
higher intelligence, and does more work in us than mere “meaning” can ever do—the trance-work
of stresses, the syllabic ecstasies whose polyphonic wild innocence mimics the birds they accidentally
name, a line so vital you must take its pulse to read it, such are the deep gifts of The Grimace of Eden,
Now.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick