"George Albon's admirable body of work functions like a musical backbone, bracing us for and facing us into the world." (Forrest Gander)
"Let melody stand for attachment"–as a phrase it's a credo and poetics, at once making melos the means and measure of the poet's relation to his environs. And tough George Albon indeed puts language as made thing between observer and world, he does so in order to examine our attachments rather than eschew them. "No sooner written," he writes, "than contended." He crafts poems so perceptually rich and critically canny that they everywhere render the complexities of affect coded as music,"resonance merging/ with its being/ struck." As attuned to "the mercantile/world working" as to the erotics of "literal skin" Fire Break reminds us of the important Objectivist legacy Oppen and Rakosi left on the West Coast. Few are more their heir than George Albon. (Brian Teare)
