Anthony Cody
Poet & Editor
American Book Award
Whiting Award
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Borders and Borderlessness
- Docupoetics
- The Archive
- Visual Poetics
- Ecopoetics
- Invented and Historical Poetic Forms
- Latinx Histories/Identities
- Experimental Writing
- Multidisciplinary Practices
- An Evening with Anthony Cody
Biography
“Cultural and environmental devastations and displacements are indexed and mapped to shape a narrative that is personal, communal, spiritual, lexical, lyrical, translational, material, multi-modal and off-the-page-virtual. This is mind blowing art for our past and future apocalypse.” –Daniel Borzutzky
“Anthony Cody unearths long-ago buried maps, trails, images, figures, and faces and vibrations of the lost, the hanged and the lynched untold stories of the Mexicans in their own lands occupied and taken.” –American Book Award Jury Citation
“Focused on immigration, detention, and survival around the U.S.-Mexico border, Cody’s fierce, righteously outraged work deserves shelf space near other recent monuments of highly political, partly conceptual poetry: m. nourbeSe philips’s Zong!, for example, or Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas.” –Stephanie Burt
Anthony Cody is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California with lineage in the Bracero Program and Dust Bowl. He is the author of The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023) and Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge as winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize, a collection which also went on to win the 2022 Whiting Award, the 2021 American Book Award, and the 2021 Southwest Book Award.
In his most recent, experimental collection The Rendering, Cody grapples with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Observing the work as “a heat-stroked ‘dreamache,’” Douglas Kearney writes, “Anthony Cody does to the poem what desert sun does to signage—cracks it open, peels it back, tears letters away to expose the blistered surface underneath. Drama, documentary, epic, and ekphrasis gather here to be shattered by Cody’s dynamic visual praxis and turbulent dread, smoking wreckage at a dead end of US ‘ancientfuture.'”
His debut, Bordland Apocrypha – also a 2020 National Book Award Finalist in Poetry and a 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist – centers around the collective histories of and responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories of borderlands terrors, excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands.
Cody co-edited How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), as well as co-edited and co-translated Juan Felipe Herrera’s Akrílica (Noemi Press, 2022). His work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets: Poem-A-Day Series, Gulf Coast, and Ninth Letter, among others. In 2020, he was honored as a Poets & Writers debut poet.
He is co-publisher of Noemi Press, and serves as a poetry editor for Omnidawn. Cody collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio, and most recently was visiting professor of poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Cody lives with his partner, the poet Mai Der Vang, and their son. He is currently faculty in poetry at Randolph College’s Low Residency MFA Program.
Short Bio
Anthony Cody is the author of The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023) and Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize. His debut has been recognized as a winner of a 2022 Whiting Award, a 2021 American Book Award, a 2020 Southwest Book Award, and a Poets & Writers 2020 Debut Poet. Cody was a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and L.A. Times Book Award, among others. He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, CA with lineage in the Bracero Program and Dust Bowl. He is co-publisher of Noemi Press and serves as an editor for Omnidawn. Cody teaches at Randolph College’s Low Residency MFA Program.
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Publications
The Rendering
Poetry, 2023
Through a series of experimental poems centered on ecology, Anthony Cody’s The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts on our current climate crisis, while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Cody encourages readers to participate in radical acts of refreshing and reimagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, and he invites us to reflect on what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current trajectory toward destruction. These poems consider if wholeness, or a journey toward wholeness, can exist in the Anthropocene. And, if wholeness cannot exist in these times, we are invited to look at our lives and the world through and beyond annihilation.
Borderland Apocrypha
Poetry, 2020
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked an end to the Mexican—American War, but it sparked a series of lynchings of Mexicans and subsequent erasures, and long-lasting traumas. This pattern of state-sanctioned violence committed towards communities of color continues to the present day. Borderland Apocrypha centers around the collective histories of these terrors, excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands. In this debut collection, Anthony Cody responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories of borderlands. His experimental poetic reinvents itself and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book in forms of resistance, signaling a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. The poems ask the reader to engage in searching through the nested and cascading series of poems centered around familial and communal histories, structural racism, and natural ecosystems of borderlands. Relentless in its explorations, this collection shows how the past continues to inform actions, policies, and perceptions in North and Central America.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• National Poetry Month: Anthony Cody – The Rumpus
• Interview with Anthony Cody – Cincinnati Review
• Review of Borderland Apocrypha – Rhino Poetry
Listen to Audio
• Anthony Cody: ‘Cada Día Más Cerca del Fin del Mundo’ – KQED
Selected Writings
- Read “‘Stop. Go put your shoes back on. They’ll know we Okies,’ a Lost Image Reclamation” – Academy of American Poets
- Read “HomeHumanMachineFailureSpiral” – POETRY
- From Borderland Apocrypha – The Paris Review
In Praise of Fences, Broken
It is deep into the summer and someone is hammering under a midday sun. Metal on metal, into the aging fence. No birds. No barks. No oldies or hums from air conditioning. Just the bang and the echo until the fence is mended.
I peer into the new quiet and see a blue-collared white cat prowling the shade of a pomegranate tree. Soon, a terrier rolls in the grass and laps a leaky faucet head. Both accepting of the other. Both, I have no clue of destinations.
They pass and disappear through an unmendable fence opening—a young saucer magnolia branch has pried open two slats, a perpetual, peering neighbor. I imagine the branch, recognizing its cousin the slat, and asking permission to grow, to make room, to share in the cramped quarters.
A new white cat, red-collared, follows the young branch, and watches me, watch it. And I consider if it is I who is bound. They are outside, free. I am not. I am uncertain of the air. On some days it is the virus, and on other days it is the fires, the smoke, ash particulate. Always it is airborne.
And before I can ruminate upon my mortality, a pandemic, or a climate annihilation, the cat soft-paws the mended fence, and the wood relents. Once again, the arrival of an open turnstile that I will inspect at dusk, only to find a hummingbird and a starling swooping through.
The starling will stay. Perch upon a sprinkler head, and gasp from an open beak. No, it will sing. No, it will call out to the murmuration, and await directions.
Tomorrow, someone will attempt to mend the fence and fail. The day after, another failed attempt. And the month ahead, more of the same. I do not need to speculate about what will occur next year.
Tonight, however, I hear the slat swing softly open. The fence, broken. A night breeze conspiring with it to signal an invitation to the outstretched, the stirring, the vibrating, the wandering, the fleeing, the others, the others, the others, the others, and still others. May they breathe, exist, and remain defiant to the noise of keep out, go back, or stay away, so that here under the stars, a new constellation finds sanctuary.
Bless these fences, broken. May others follow.
