Listen My Friend; This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night

"Moving seamlessly from sweeping vistas of the massive structures controlling our world, to the human scale, and the individual lives implicated in and affected by these systems, this poem draws attention to our fundamental interconnectedness." -Ryo Yamaguchi, Poetry Foundation

Unlike anything The Song Cave has ever published, Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night is a book of wonder in which poet Cody-Rose Clevidence layers the language of information with the language of the heart; constantly locating the connections between attention and perception. On each page local and global concerns combine in an effort to reveal what it's like to live right now. With its uncategorizable form; somewhere between an essay and a prose poem, Clevidence mixes anthropology, poetry, autobiography, history, psychology and philosophy; with subject matter ranging from agriculture, gender, justice, loneliness and pollution to space, guns, moths, family, grief and longing-it's hard to name a subject relevant to our time that isn't in this book. Clevidence's deft movement between facts and feelings is immediate from the first page: with an inquisitive and searching voice stretched over one long, never-breaking block of prose, a catalog that becomes revelatory by the end, allowing readers to imagine a new way of processing their world.
Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Beast Feast (2014) and Flung/Throne (2018), both from Ahsahta Press, and Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat) as well as several handsome chapbooks. They live in the Arkansas Ozarks.