Cody-Rose Clevidence's latest, AUX ARC TRYPT ICH: Poppycock and Assphodel; Winter; A Night of Dark Trees (forthcoming from Nightboat Books, October 2021), once more shows Clevidence is a poet with an otherworldly—or really, so very thiswordly—capacity to traverse all manner of planes. Throughout AUX ARC TRYPT ICH, Clevidence's feet are firmly planted in the Arkansas Ozarks, but the celestial, the digital, the interior, and the ancient are just a few of the places AUX ARC TRYPT ICH goes. Coming in on the heels of the release of the book-length paragraph Listen My Friend This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (Song Cave, 2021), Clevidence's new triptych is nothing short of a magnum opus. 

Clevidence may live alone in the Ozark National Forest—what you might call "off the grid"—but Clevidence is not disconnected. Clevidence is actually extremely connected. And not just via hand-built irrigation systems and meme-browsing, but also through a sort of super-sentience. Clevidence shows us their grid of Ozark undergrowth, all those scurrying things whose bellies brush it and the google searches they spawn, "the wonder of being an organism that seeks its needs."

Clevidence's language, too, is a wonder. Words are stripped (and it's sexy) down to their roots, and their roots are shown to be part of the grid. Morning is never far from mourning, egret never far from regret: every human thing has its earthy counterpart. At risk of losing focus, Clevidence pulls in Ovid, Homer, Archimedes, Virgil, Blake, Rilke, and more. If focus is lost, it only serves Clevidence's speed of travel through space/time. In AUX ARC TRYPT ICH, Old English meets yr text feed (Clevidence has a companion in Jos Charles). In a 2019 interview with The Creative Independent, Clevidence described social media as "the only commons [they] have." There is a certain cyber quality to Clevidence's work, no doubt: "jewelweed seedpod : google it / deleted jargon of sadness — [] th'glitter / of it [breaks]." While reading, I found myself wanting to drop some of Clevidence's text into Python just to see the error message I'd get. Or to see a live snake break through the screen. 

Perhaps most compelling throughout AUX ARC TRYPT ICH is the window that Clevidence gives us into their spiritual reckonings. Unshy in their cynicism of religious institutions, Clevidence seems unable to deny some divine. Moments of prayer ("rake th whole acre of stars down / o lord have mercy on") rise up alongside the stark acknowledgement that, "none of us have a god / at our backs to hold up / the dawn for us." In a moment of lucidity, Clevidence declares, "I think the world evolved organisms to feel it. to crawl across its surface impelled or repelled by the feeling of it. to hold it inside them. which we do." Clevidence wants us to hold them better, and with this comes an absolute and compelling demand for "the demolition of the cathedral." A delicate balance is negotiated perfectly here. As a reader, I was left shifting between two dirty knees for prayer and all fours for scurrying through Clevidence's illuminated "night of dark trees."

October, 2021