Cody-Rose Clevidence's Beast Feast Is Reviewed at MAKE Magazine

Beast Feast (Ahsahta Press 2014), the debut collection from Cody-Rose Clevidence, is given a review at MAKE Magazine. Matt Margini writes that the book " hurls itself at the challenge of creating a posthuman language with feral abandon, striving for a wilderness in language, of language, that might establish for us a vantage outside of language." More:

Beast Feast’s title implies poems about wolves under the moon, feeding greedily on the warm corpse of a rabbit, or bears pawing lackadaisically at a river full of salmon, confident a catch is imminent. But the title refers less to the content of the collection and more instead to its form. Beast Feast’s poems are slobbery, bodily affairs, preoccupied with munching and fucking and shitting and puking and “creatural body’s heat.” Sometimes the bestiality becomes a metaphor for rapacious capitalism, describing the undulations of a “daisy-studded nasdaq” or a “fluctuating market economy” that “bows & twirls & spouts & blooms.” More often it is guttural utterance of a non-referential kind, deliberately unattached to meaning; it is grunting, throat-clearing, “the inarticulation before the articulation.” But what really makes the title emblematic is not what it denotes (or connotes) but how it sounds, how it feels as it rolls off the lapping, even bestial tongue of the reader’s imagination. It’s semi-tautological wordplay—two words, almost the same, poised for endless repetition: Beast Feast Beast Feast Beast Feast Beast… It’s a two-word construct that’s highly linguistic despite the ostensibly a- or pre-linguistic connotations of the words themselves; it’s a construct that approximates beasthood formally, not thematically, by pitching language itself into the cyclicalities of instinct.

The poems constantly attempt to body forth a poetics of animality.Then again, as Derrida reminds us, “animality” is a word which functions to police and pigeonhole the nonhuman for their lack of language. Perhaps we should call it a poetics of bare life, achieved—if it is achieved—through unending experiments in linguistic self-reflexivity. The Ouroboros is the book’s totem animal, the beast in question; in every space of the text, language eats itself and reemerges to eat again, an autophagy “tongue-tied nausea of form.” The question is whether this autophagy—this “tongue-tied nausea of form”—can do anything to get us past the intrinsic cannibalism of language.

And Beast Feast can be read as a series of jagged meditations on the sublimation of the organic into thetechnological, a process the collection evokes on the level of form. Indeed, Clevidence’s poems are distinctly unnatural affairs, artificial, manufactured...

Read an excerpt from the book, and the full review, at MAKE.