"Under Albany is the shadow movement of Ron Silliman's epic of everyday life, The Alphabet. Silliman provides a set of extended, vividly etched, mostly autobiographical, meditations on the background for each of the original 100 sentences of his 1981 poem Albany. This constructivist memoir provides an exquisitely rich exploration of the relation of context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to presented experience, and composition to poetics. All of Silliman's work unravels and reforms in this exemplary and exhilarating act of attention, recollection, and reflection." --Charles Bernstein

"One of the major language poets (and now an ardent poetry blogger), Silliman has previously referred to his poem Albany, published in 1981, as his autobiography. Here he uses the spare sentences of that language-era work as starting points for yet another round of self-fashioning. The book closes with the sentence 'It is not possible to 'describe a life,' '; what Silliman gives us is not descriptions of the antiwar protests of the late '60s, his various living arrangements or childhood in working-class California, but the infinitely branching chains of event and idea of which a life is composed. When Silliman notes that the first lines of Ketjak were inspired by a performance of Steve Reich's Drumming or explains that his work in the prison reform movement has taught him 'the sense of time as urgency without future,' he does so in a manner, wonderfully particular to his work, that shows how process makes the person. Having recently completed his 26-volume (!) poem The Alphabet, this telescoping of life into language and then of language into further sentential florescence seems particularly appropriate. Under a sign of his own making, Silliman offers a brilliantly readable portrait of his poetics and of the places and times of his life." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)