Poetry. "The heir to Modernism at its most terse and most oblique, Mobilio works line and sound forcefully together, managing amazingly acrobatic moves. With an eye for the monumental incidental, he winds through ekphrastic gesture and an eccentric abecedarium to give us a tour of the contemporary that's quick, vivid, and wry almost to the point of irony—but not quite. Instead, he sticks with the tenacious questions, probing the slim abysses between a life's well-oiled parts. It's delightful, witty, and deeply moving all at once."—Cole Swensen
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
Albert Mobilio's books of poetry include BENDABLE SIEGE, THE GEOGRAPHICS, Me with Animal Towering, and TOUCH WOOD. He collaborated with Roger Andersson on Letters from Mayhem, an artist's book published by Cabinet Books. The co-editor of Bookforum, he also teaches at the New School's Eugene Lang College.
Reviews and Other Links
Sima Rabinowitz @ NewPages
Andy Frazee @ The Quarterly Conversation
Kara Candito @ Agni online
Alan Gilbert @ Boston Review
Jerome Murphy @ The Brooklyn Rail
Heather Hartley @ The Rumpus
Eileen Myles @ Poetry Foundation
Heather Hartley @ The Rumpus
“It’s a dangerous imperative. All the more so when it turns out it’s touching you before you can touch it. With a dash of reverb, distortion, and flange, Mobilio does Dashiell Hammett doing Dickinsonian compression in discordant voices. Part fever dream, part paralytic empiricism, all yoked together by venom and violets, these poems gesture, point, gently command the world to renew itself, and the self to quit hobnobbing thusly. So do it. TOUCH WOOD. Flesh out the noun machine with pulsating musculature. Turns out the acoustics in this place are stunning, even if the conductor’s ditched his baton for a hatchet, hacking melodiously away. It’s a dangerous imperative—this convulsive beauty.”
—Noah Eli Gordon