There are a lot of poets I love and have met along the way in this THICK issue of Oversound. It features a long poem of mine, “Ekpyrosis, The Watershed” (pictures are excerpts, a few of the 9 pages). It’s about the grind, the purgatory of working, the empire of time. I first drafted it a few years ago, deep under the influence of Samuel Delany’s prose in The Motion of Light on Water, Novalis, and so many walks around the Covid-lockdown-emptied streets Buffalo.

I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the one that’s going to kick off my next next book,to be published in a few years, a future I’m so apprehensive of.

You can find me performing it here.

I’m also more and more mindful when publishing poems about work and alienation of a few fundamentals. Ali Kadri is the one bringing them most recently to mind: work under capitalism alienates us from ourselves andsociety; the only way out of that trap is engaging in collective, anti-systemic struggle. At the same time, I’m in the imperial core and lucky to not have to engage in the kind of work in which, in Kadri’s term, “the living laborer himself serves as an input into his own death.” Sending much love out to everyone taking part in those struggles to dismantle these machines of death, to dismantle American militarism & ecocidal industry. & those risking it all, especially.