Joel Kuszai's "Accidency"

Joel Kuszai's anarchist-inflected social lyrics wreak havoc on the simulated sense of our surround-sound society. Kuszai's exuberant poems surge with voicings that pierce thought. Accidency is a pleasure of the senses, mindful of eye and ear. This long-awaited debut is scintillating.

from the Afterword:
After identifying a source text or series of texts, mixing, scrambling or sorting them, producing a block of text composed of phrases from the original but out of order … sometimes more than a thousand pages long, I would begin cutting, deleting, editing, trimming in a process more like sculpture than writing …I would begin chipping away, looking for the form inside to emerge. Often it would not and the cutting room floor would represent the tattered fragments of having nothing to say and the tragedy of not finding it said elsewhere. Other times, a lyrical thread would be found, a narrative fragment expressed in leaps across semantic seams.

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lake of brackish waters
further to make room
allarum to my eyes

hue all hues or two
from state but speech alone
             where to sound thing forgot
           thousand torment thrice three-fold
        to be crossed