Cody Todd runs a risk, perhaps consciously, in titling his new short collection of work To Frankenstein, My Father. As so many gothic Victorian page-turners and popcorn-clutching matinee goers have made the mistake in doing, a reader, hearing the surname, could quite possibly forgo the allusion to mad scientist and head straight for the image of a stitched-up and monosyllabic beast. By attaching lineage to the overlooked doctor, Todd forces a complex patrilineal relationship. Does he see himself a biological son of the monomaniacal surgeon? The patchwork creature of that man’s invention? Product of the monster itself?
If we let the eleven poems in Todd’s chapbook answer these questions for us, we can claim all three as correct. In brief fashion, To Frankenstein, My Father provides a cobbled view of the poet, both in substance and style. Todd moves from lyrically gentle (“I’ll bask in the voices that speak their constancy. The yellow, jettisoned piece of moonlight, a refugee in this bedroom” from “Sympathetic Music of Moths”) to bludgeoningly sentimental (“And they’re true, those stories you trace with your fingers—how one can make sense of this hapless, blue, spinning ball” from the same poem). These moves seem akin to the aforementioned doctor, at work creating, simultaneously, a piece of art and a hapless lug. Upon interaction with each poem, the reader must wonder whether they'll be picked a flower by Todd or thrown into the river.
Subject matter also develops an eclectic image of Todd, as he assembles his own poetic body. The arm of deceased West coast rapper Tupac Shakur gets sewn on not far from where the heart of Russian modernist Vladmir Mayakovsky beats, now repurposed and stuck in Todd’s own chest. Too, locations vary, from mental urban landscapes inhabited by graffiti artists and giant apes to silent bedrooms of shifting light. The transplants of these multifarious organs and limbs do result in some rejects: he stumbles on more realistically grounded fare, with “The Heart Throb” and its jarring incongruity, and is most successful when his spirit slinks out and above his own soma, as in “To Eurydice."
Above all else, Todd hopes to demand your attention. In “It Isn’t Until Your Absence That I’ve Wanted to Warn You,” Todd tells us that “the only thing I want is the ears, // and your mind chained between them / like King Kong.” Iron-clad and bound like this, the reader can’t help but feel like the next curious operation of Cody Frankenstein, who himself admires the curiosity: “Painfully sweet, / this slight contempt // within passing readers, / such as you or me, / for its illegibility.” With this collection, we have to wonder what is meant to be legible—the body of work, or the body? We are sure to get more sutured, and further streamlined, monsters to confront this question from Todd in the future.