With a debut dark as coffee, Dean Cocozza doesn’t surprise any of his readers. What’s surprising is, that poetry of ‘zero dark thirty’s intensity is finding its place in the main stream.
There’s a lot of new poets out there, trying their shot, sharing their scribbles and thoughts with the help of social media. Writing is cool again, and the different possibilities of publishing today are surely the main motivation behind the trend.
Dean Cocozza comes from song writing, where he started writing lyrics for friends and at some point professionally for and with musicians, who were looking for help. He claims his personal writing, and often his favourite, would rarely align with the very structured nature of lyrics. Especially rhyming and rhythm is something he doesn’t necessarily see in strong words. So he was looking for other places to publish his writings – and ended up on social media.
Other than just tweeting or posting words, he built up his very own aesthetic and style using all of his assets – including his instrumentals, vision and his own persona. The mysterious insights as well as the heartfelt, mostly intense imagery writings, created his own little world, with plenty of people intrigued by it.
So it is little surprise that his first book was compared to ‘a Nick Cave album’ by his publisher mehnert/paris in Berlin, who helped the writer realize the project. ‘zero dark thirty’, is named after the military lingo for the time between midnight and dawn. Cocozza, who served in the Air Force, claims that he had written majority of the book during a time accompanied by insomnia. The book is everything but sleepy either, with lines such as
“at night I still wake up falling through the hole I tore into your dream”
touching the same place they came from. It’s the mix of genuine desire, heartbreak, love and passion that makes the words not only believable, but intrigues readers into discovering something new. What looks dark, is actually the reflection of an author searching to come into harmony with himself while expressing his emotions for another.