The Built World by George Albon

In this “nomad music” at once oblique and demotic, worlds come into and out of being. Experimental neighborhoods, queer provinces. Formally immaculate former places: actual sites once occupied by mobile homes, yellow concrete, dust. Not absent now but full of vibrant green and rain puddles, under sky that “gathers like cloud.” In these stellar post-punk Schuyleresque meditations, an island metamorphoses into pearl, and “all our vocations are semi-permeable.” Everywhere these carefully built temporary worlds, this delicate slipshod multiplicity of places. George Albon is right there, he attends it—with focus, clarity, and love. Why what is shelter because what is not.

—Jason Morris

The Built World creates stately lines of texture and sound in which juxtapositions of various sorts rearrange expectations in exhilarating heady moments of simultaneity. The outside and the inside wonderfully interpenetrate. Words from different registers or wide-ranging disciplines slam together, information engages feeling, sound propels engagement; the ordinary confronts the extraordinary.

—Martha Ronk

A tremendous scope is needed to imagine the world from as many of its countless angles as poetry can hold—a world made of words and their sounds, maximally gentle and steadfast. In The Built World connection is understood as the spaces between things and scenes that move continuously, resonating underneath with all represented surfaces and experiences. This is a tough, beautiful, provocative, companionable book of poems.

—Anselm Berrigan

George Albon is the author of Lyric Multiples: Aspiration Practice Immanence Migration, Fire Break, Aspiration, Momentary Songs, Step, Brief Capital of Disturbances, Thousands Count Out Loud, and Empire Life. Work of his has appeared in Chicago Review, Hambone, O Anthology 4, New American Writing, Crayon, Poetry Salzburg Review, and elsewhere; and in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, Bay Poetics, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2018. Pieces on Morton Feldman and Otis Redding have appeared in Shuffle Boil. Tunes from George Albon and The Sheaves can be heard on Bandcamp. His essay “The Paradise of Meaning” was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives in San Rafael, California.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-438-3