HOLLOW_cover2.jpg
HOLLOW_cover2.jpg

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

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 for-

mer editor at Bookforum and Hyperallergic, he is an associ-

ate professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College at

the New School.