The Thousand Wall Stare

Author: Dezy Kosmo

Publisher: 1080PRESS (2025)

Opening with a dedication for “all my relatives the world over who showed me the Truth of Love when I felt Beauty had gone under” — Dezy Kosmo’s Thousand Wall Stare attends to Beauty and its suppression, mobilizing uncommon language to create common spaces.

Writing among the streets of New Orleans and New York, Kosmo invites the reader to engage with different modes of language and expand upon the words we share.

Thousand Wall Stare regenerates language through compound words and inventions— “solar-sanguiséance” “remesmurrected”— which are printed in fluctuating typefaces and signal tonal shifts across the book.

By playing with laconic blanks and “RECAPTCHA,” Dezy Kosmo’s poetics both responds to and reifies, instructing: “You can’t be ungovernable until you’re unknowable from core to carn” and “There is no such thing as the personal.”

Responding to the estrangement of the self that can happen through addiction/a-diction. All of this is rendered rhythmically in dense, lyrical flow, at times harsh and beautiful.