The poetry in George Albon's Brief Capital of Disturbances deals with states of being. The majority of the poems are crafted like moments, snapshots chronicling the ways in which humans understand and cope with time. They are candid still-lifes ambling on, transitioning from instance to instance in a cerebral re-creation of life. There are no titles in the book, only short blocks or blurbs of prose fragments, two to a page with a few variations. This consistency, paired with blank space on the page-symbolic of lack and the presence of time-creates a forward motion and instructs the reader in how to read it: keep with the prosody as if you were reading a novel of shorts. However, this seeming continuity is disrupted by threes. There are imbedded sections, marked by tercets of much sparser diction, allowing for shifts in the longer structure of images. Perhaps these tercets mark the instant of the poem, the mind's flip to a new strand of thought. One gains the insight that the past and future are constants, being both known and unknowable, and that the present-the only true state of being-is equivalent to limbo. "The mill and the geyser, all in pouring rain, a way to spend the / light. The present location, said the driver, was 'here-ish.'" We are neither here nor there, but are caught somewhere near-"The middle of the bed, which we are outside of but lean / toward, feeling mixtures of warmth, proximity, time, small / sounds from the head: vagaries of the semi-conscious."

Albon's subjects are strangers. There are blurbs about photographs- a girl sitting on a porch, loggers standing around or on or in newly felled trees-and references to movie scenes in which the third wall is broken and the audience is given a closer look while never getting too close. The relationship remains voyeuristic; the subjects are discussed, almost with a familial or "insider" perspective, yet the audience is never fully allowed to get comfortable. "The / look on her face is shock but also a kind of comprehension. / My view of her is unearned and voyeuristic." We remain on the fringes of this person, this object, and Albon asks his readers to consider the fine line between speculation and perception. When is a character a created something, and when does that character become real? In a blurb about Emily Dickinson, or rather the obsession some scholars and critics have with her life, Albon writes, "A detailed analysis of her handwriting and its vagrancies / through the years, in what seems a clear spirit of tracking a / pathology-an 'analysis' that would never be visited on a male / poet." Again the reader is asked to contemplate the idea of speculated myth, to ponder the motives behind creating an icon, an object, out of a respected individual.

Albon criticizes media tactics, ways of recording history, and suggests that the individual makes the event while leaving a lineage of interpretation. Always somewhere in a space between reality and fabrication, Albon's poetry moves us from one moment to the next, knowing or presuming that there will be an end or a sunrise, but never quite achieving the momentum or desire to reach it. "And just now I read / in a book that the werewolf lives between nature and politics."

/M/A/R/Y/