NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER! Beginning of the Hollow by Albert Mobilio
$20.00
I’m sorry. 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
About the Author
Albert Mobilio is the author of four books of poetry (Same Faces, Touch Wood, Me with Animal Towering, The Geographics), a book of fiction (Games and Stunts), and a collection of essays (Reading Against Type). He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing and a Whiting Award. He has been a MacDowell Fellow and won an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant. A former editor at Bookforum and Hyperallergic, he is an associate professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College at the New School.
