Born Two

by Allison Cobb

Poetry. "Allison Cobb's BORN TWO brings monsters out of memory and an unexpected sweetness out of the firestorms of language. Hers is the mind of poetry, driven by history and lured by love, caught in the act of the need to know. Like a child after family secrets, Cobb turns up more truths than the ones she seems to be seeking. Childlike, too, are her characters, whose adventures carry them nearer and nearer the beautiful, erotic, and tragic world of knowledge"--Susan Tichy. "For this new century, a poetry of minus signs. Like many of her generation, Allison Cobb's curious about the wheres, whens and whys of our predicament. Through compression, cubtraction, amputation and dispersal, she manages to scrape a hole across the ice on the windshield. BORN TWO peels away the myths of the American West to reveal the twitchy nerve beneath"--Kevin Killian.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2004

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Allison Cobb’s linguistically inventive take on origin—in this case, a childhood spent in the colonialized, bomb-born ambience of Los Alamos, NM—is like the same strip of territory mapped by airplane, satellite, seismograph, hiker’s sketches, local hearsay, and yellowed records from City Hall, all laid on top of one another until the area becomes palimpsest of the angles used to map it. The result is a provoking experiment in locating a self in space and time: poetry as echolocation, sound as sounding, verse as place.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A romp(er) in the sense that everything is worn, frayed, last legs etc. That the language is newish and known, a sound fulcrum, & um (sic) becoming. No being the master in these poems, no meaning no to those who wish to 'ah' at the end of the poem/section/book. Unless it's "ah! i just stepped on that honey." That's this book. Honey and glue and milky inconsistencies feeding both ends of the fire back to its original burning, ornery burning. Loosie-goosie fires that "flap flap". Yay!

[Wade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five very different, yet cohesive, sections make up this strange little book. It's language is delightful, as are the risks it takes. There's all sorts of collage, vispo, cancel-text, prose poems, even a play of sorts. Yet it's never as random or disjunctive as this write-up might imply. Read it, you'll be surprised!

[Rye · Rating 2 out of 5]

"How would you feel / if someone you didn't know / called you 'baby'?"