THIS HOUSEHOLD OF EARTHLY NATURE
by Cody-Rose Clevidence
In This Household of Earthly Nature poet and poetic essayist Cody-Rose Clevidence delves into the far reaches of our planet, from homestead to information theory, from ancient history to global economics to possible futures, connecting all things; Walmart, shipping lanes, what it means to have family, friends and memories, to labor, love, to ways of knowing, and all of us together inside these vast and shifting networks. Rooted firmly in the Anthropocene, in the fragmented and information-dense internet-connected world and also in their own rural daily life, this essay-poem charts a mind grappling with what it means to be alive now, in this particular time in our planet’s and our species’ evolution, from the domestication of the first grain to whatever is inevitably coming next.
Praise for Cody-Rose Clevidence
This Household of Earthly Nature tears through the hard plastic shell of the human hard drive to get to its generative core. Whether Dante and Milton are decomposing in the garden or at the bottom of the modernist dump, their atoms are in your hell and your paradise. We live in the long unfinished sentence of capital’s spiraling death drive, its “panopticon and aria” of accumulation and sorrow, radiance and radiation in which “all writing is archaeology.” Point to what matters. I’m so glad you’re here, Cody-Rose Clevidence writes. You’re just in time. We’re in this simulation together. It’s time to pick some seeds to save. This is how we hold the world. Here are the tangled threads.
– Elizabeth Willis, author of Liontaming in America
This Household of Earthly Nature documents the way things are in the Anthropocene while also offering a visionary materialist metaphysics that extends from motherboard to homestead to spaceship and beyond. Part daybook documenting “the sensed experience of the shared world” and part valediction of the “sense in which the earth itself is our shared technology,” this sprawling verse essay posits an ensouled world, an oikos that consists of the “connectedness of all things” …a singular talent of radical ambition. –Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
Dear Reader, prepare thyself to burst. This Household of Earthly Nature is a hard-won, grief-sown celebration. This is our emergency: “the crush of angels…the electric hymnal of the night.” In language such as this, the world as we encounter it appears too beautiful and full of grief, too irreversible and headlong bearing down to think and feel beyond the incandescent limits of our attention. Part paean to the fact-lit materia of creation, part elegiac song of loss, the single poem that is this book unfolds as a kind of spiral litany, a keeping track of things at once in deep relation and beset upon by cosmic loneliness. Here, for you, are the stark occurrences of a writer’s earth-bent wrack-line vision.
– Nick Gulig, poet laureate of Wisconsin
Cody-Rose Clevidence demonstrates, in a sprawling network of erudition that is itself a materialist testament to ordinary beauty and an experimental synthesis of poetry and science, that knowledge is remediated half and afterlives, that nature is as we have done, and love, that invisible force that truly connects us, by necessity coagulates with information, infrastructure, instantaneity, and other ineluctable flows that humanity won’t be here much longer to witness. This Household of Earthly Nature’s anti-prescriptivist contradiction, and generative genius, is that its operations fit no other model than Clevidence’s own anarchic making, one which would share and encompass everything we’ve ever made.
– Alicia Wright
About the Author
Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat, 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, 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.