The Rendering

The Rendering by Anthony 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: “the binary dies // with the climate.” Reimagining the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, this second collection maps their human makers with hashtags, footnotes, and graphs. The book also includes QR codes linking to online files, a poll question on littering, and a series of Dorothea Lange photos that are upended and threaded with text, like this excerpt from a poem that accompanies overlapping translucent iterations of a single image:

//////the          eyes/////////////
///////of   a   family////////////
///////averted//////////////////
////in     the    statedream///

“A man on television” represents the “statedream” at the border, having “owned the land, accumulated the wealth, profited from the bodies, and now hav[ing] architectured a voice via the throatbox of bones.” Such vanity illustrates the intimate connection between Earth’s accelerating dismantlement and prevailing nationalisms, all deadly. The man suggests migrants should “learn English [to] understand the American Dream and take the shortcut,” but “[t]here is no mention of cages or aerosols or borders or drought. Only carbon and crop yield. The yield is good. Yield is good.” Under this absolute measure of capital, borders, like natural disasters, generate selective suffering.

Cody’s poems are experiments full of “infinite         dreamaches” that search: “in my dreams i know i cannot ask. awake i ask the internet.” The startling visual and verbal recursions and reiterations throughout the collection are “a call toward wakefulness,” toward attention—to interstices and gaps in photographs and dreams, to monuments, land, and memories that glitch as even vowels go missing:

Bynd th wndw
Pn f ll rds tht hv frkd
Trn snk tng hssng snlght
Prss t t yr mth
tst th knwng f gnshng tdl wvs