Same Faces

Poetry. Finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Award for Poetry. Where are the faces of yesteryear? Is one face easier to wear than another? Questions as crucial as these are left unanswered in Albert Mobilio's fifth book of poems. Instead, the vexed relationship between the physical world --it's tactility and "thereness" --and this phantasm we call persona is interrogated. The sound of thinking in these poems is familiar even as it moves through dictions at once terse and oblique, then plaintive and probing. Gestural turns, which are acrobatic, melodic and wry, fashion missives from the breach between what we say and what we mean. "Ah, literature," Mobilio observes "me lifted by thee wrongly."