Start with a rendering: to give again, to give back, to yield, as in letting go, giving up or giving in, surrendering; to pay up, give out, give off, or bring up, as in vomit, throw back; the act of returning or restoring something, or to bring forth, bring about: to cause to be or become. Some of this has to do with memory, with remembering. The haphazard sign system of internal storage, when what leaks out is not the fidelitous translation of an original but its stuttering utterance. The way that the tradition of storytelling counters capitalist logic; how nothing here really gets accumulated, only retrieved and redeemed, only repeated differently with each successive rendering; how the sometimes inaudible and extant cry or call of the flesh staves off the singularity of narrative for its multiple and displacing versions.
The work of poet Anthony Cody, a descendant of the Bracero Program that brought so many low-paid and temporary guest workers from Latin America to fulfill labor shortages during the interwar period and the Cold War, is rooted in the complex and often transactional maneuvers of identity and belonging; the polyphonic speakers of his poems a testament to the striations of a memory fragmented but also flattened by historical trauma, by the variegated residues of colonialism and its attendant massacres: ecological and economic precarity, the extraction of human labor and natural resources, the rehearsal of ethnic cleansing, xenophobia, mass deportation, and nationalism; all of the above, and then some. Cody’s poetics—his use of lineation and arrangement as a form of division and dispersal—indexes both the excess and scarcity brought by democratic capitalism, registering the absences and omissions intrinsic to any operation of representation, as well as to the pathways and divergences of migration and dispossession that have been produced in its wake. Cody’s (Omnidawn, 2023) serves as more than a direct follow-up to his award-winning debut collection, , published four
