Description
Poetry. LGBT Studies. A moment is an inside flutter, a reflection, a civil relapse. George Albon's MOMENTARY SONGS sound the possibilities of forwardness and hope in a surrounding twilight of unprecedented venality. Using a variety of registers—lyrical inquiry, Blakean exhortation, the satirical spiel of Morgenstern's Gallows Songs—they search for alternative states (public ones, affective ones) as well as offer a probe on what has come to pass: "In this eclipse are we the inclement for placing it?"
"'Avuncular spotted drones,' be warned. Not since Guston did Nixon has the resource of art been turned on the throne with such hopeful scurrility. Albon's MOMENTARY SONGS are hymns for the unchurched 'pioneers / of the bottom edge,' who know 'all midnights are false' and want back their stars. I'm taking my news from the other George—resistance isn't futile, it's the 'sunlight is information' age and Minerva's owl sings 'coup due.'"vRodney Koeneke
Author Bio
George Albon is the author of EMPIRE LIFE (Littoral Books, 1998), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& press, 2000), BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), STEP (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006), MOMENTARY SONGS (Krupskaya, 2008), ASPIRATION (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and FIRE BREAK (Nightboat Books, 2013), winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Poetry in 2014, and LYRIC MULTIPLES (Nightboat Books, 2018). His work has appeared in HAMBONE, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, BAY POETICS, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay "The Paradise of Meaning" was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives and works in San Francisco.
Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA