George Albon in conversation with Maxwell Shanley

from Nightboat Press

A poet’s capacious and visionary sequence of essays exploring language and aesthetics in contemporary society

Lyric Multiples comprises four essays written over the last decade. The subject is poetry but the essays range over such topics as the evolution of the human call, ascensional modes of thinking, pop songs, the built environment and its discontents, the post-punk moment, its fruitful aftermath, and much else. Throughout this book, Albon explores unencountered varieties of aesthetic experience and the contributions they make to an ideal of social interconnectivity.

George Albon’s most recent books are Fire Break, winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Poetry in 2014, and Aspiration. He lives in San Francisco.

Maxwell Shanley, author of There Are Trees (Drop Leaf Press), is the Sales & Marketing Assistant at Stanford University Press and a former used book buyer at Green Apple Books & Music. He is currently completing an MFA at San Francisco State University, where he formerly served as the Managing Editor of Fourteen Hills. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New American Writing, Berkeley Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, CutBank, MIDTERM, Border Crossing, Camas: The Nature of the West, Slipstream, Transfer Magazine, The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, Four Ties Lit Review, and has been performed by Theatrikos Theatre Company. He lives in San Francisco.

What has been said about the work of George Albon:

“Lyric Multiples is a triumph from beginning to end—a miracle of sustained argument and elaboration. In a process of continuous vision and revision, words and images appear, return, slip around the corners, only to return again to form multivalent entrances to truth.” —Kevin Killian