Albert Mobilio

It’s impossible to characterize Beginning of the Hollow. In the early pages, Albert Mobilio lavishes on us the spellbinding pacing of acrobatic, recursive sentences—aka his “narrative difficulty”—which, though they include riveting observational details, “strange turns” of syntax, understated humor, and a pentathlon of competing dictions, feel somehow like CAT scans of the soul. Then there are softly spoken introspective poems and, toward the end, a long sequence of short gnomic declarations and fragments so strikingly various in tone, so linguistically alive and entertaining, they might be renga composed by some hard-boiled detective and a lovelorn Buddhist philosopher. Charged with vivacity, totally “unbuttoned,” psychologically alarming, and fashioned with a dexterity few poets can match, Mobilio’s Beginning of the Hollow comes fully loaded. And here you’ll find even “better words than the words/ that make people do things.” —Forrest Gander [on Beginning of the Hollow] 

“Intelligence is the first gift here—active, troublemaking, rapture-prone, intelligence. The intelligence that animates Mobilio's celebrated essays and reviews is brightly present in these poems, glittering with quick dance steps, delirious with almost unkept promises. Every page is full of surprises, and I can't think of a poet who so consistently astonishes me with deft moves.” —Robert Kelly [on Me With Animal Towering]

“The Geographics teems with heady, inexhaustible embarkation. A piece of the self is buried inside each departure and, we learn, ‘the ground itself is launched.’ That the skies are ‘geologic’ might thus come as no surprise, but what's around the next clausal bend or stipulatory turn almost always does. This extraordinary book is wise beyond comment or commendation, so true to its way it adduces its own lucid blurb, albeit unintended: ‘These documents require better lips than ours.’”
 —Nathaniel Mackey