Poetry. LGBT Studies. Citing Oppen's "moment in which one has not yet found terms," STEP follows its quarry along the braided stream of the body, tracing the shifting boundaries between language and thought. Here is a poem whose formal coherence belies the stability of its chosen structure: tercets catch and release the line, its "liquid voice" purling among their confines, murmuring of meaning both contained and abraded by its passage through form. Marking the dissolving destinies and residual beginnings of speech, STEP evokes a shimmering surface where backgrounds and foregrounds interchange, "as though the / lack were open / to reach through" and "a point gotten to / is not finally point&mdash;" but a rift in vapor. Inside an experience, there exists a harmonics of inchoate and articulate thought. With perfect pitch, Albon amplifies this moment before the mind delimits experience into a universe of emergent truth. "George Albon's admirable body of work functions like musical backbone, bracing us for and facing us into the world. The book-length sequence STEP might be experienced, as the title suggests, as a ladder of phenomenological 'declarings' for which 'every / word is a "way"' and a rung not upward but inward, 'indelivered' to the complex ligaments and muscle of experience. Each stanza is a charged 'tone held until / meaning.' Start reading this book and you'll immediately be irritable should anyone interrupt you."&mdash;Forrest Gander "Before there's even a STEP, there's a poem of growth and limitation involving shaping and placing. Then come the brights and darks, the arcature, lunette and pediment. Proportions 'embed/characterize' geometry as a constant music, a rare pleasure. Among the Dantesque 'dark/ yellow woods,' there is 'no guide.' As a consequence, other scales emerge and perform. Revolution, trusting, becomes revelation. We recognize in STEP a mystery poem."&mdash;Norma Cole

Step

Literature & Fiction

Albon, George

Poetry

The Post-Apollo Press

Poetry. This much anticipated first full-length edition of Albon's work brings together two long pieces: the title poem, 88 eight-line lyrics, is a workaday fleshing out of time spent under inner and outer American weathers, and Cosmophagy marks a daring incursion into the heart of the sentence. For a reader first encountering this writing, Albon's purposeful and mature technique will make motion/ & emotional/ coffers change. Albon's poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rhizome, The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry, O Anthology, Ribot, and Hambone. He lives in San Francisco.

Empire Life

Littoral Books

Inspired by the journals of Roland Barthes (and by the cahier tradition in general), Albon uses the sentence and short paragraph as subtly syncopated listening devices, sounding for intimate and often surprisingly revelatory details of the daily encounters that comprise urban living. Faithfully rendering each moment's aliveness and attuned to experience as a kind of wordless address, he repeatedly enlarges the parameters of what language can encompass and communicate.

Brief Capital of Disturbances

Omnidawn

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History &amp; Criticism. LGBT Studies. "I think of aspiration as the state where a poet's thrown together life-structures both invite and are breached by the poet's preoccupations—known ones, new ones. It's the dream of meaningful placement and the open set."—George Albon

Aspiration

History & Criticism

Fire Break is a suite of untitled lyric poems which move through a succession of present moments, bringing through the weave both hard-edged engagement and uncommon harmonics. In the mix can be heard messages of desire, physicality, global imbalances, and ultimately, creation.

Fire Break

Nightboat Books

Lyric Multiples comprises four essays written over the last decade. The subject is poetry but the essays range over such topics as the evolution of the human call, ascensional modes of thinking, pop songs, the built environment and its discontents, the post-punk moment, its fruitful aftermath, and much else. Throughout this book, Albon explores unencountered varieties of aesthetic experience and the contributions they make to an ideal of social interconnectivity.

Lyric Multiples

Essays & Correspondence

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