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After We All Died
In After We All Died, poet Allison Cobb examines modes of crisis not from the point of recognizing they are impending or even inevitable, but from the realization one’s entire reality––on the scale of the individual, the cultural, the ecological––has been an eventuality constructed within the crosshairs of history. Combining various iterations of the anxiousness common to life in late-capitalist America with the claustrophobic awareness of Earth’s biopolitical fate, the book copes with calamity through mourning, placing at its conceptual and emotional center the question when did everything die? Rather than claiming to have an answer, or providing an insufficient one, this inquiry is suspended, mid-air, so that readers might reconsider the circumstances under which such a question must be articulated: not because an answer will save us, but because acknowledging it as unanswerable begins the process of understanding one’s grief.
Cobb’s dystopian sensibility recalls Ursula Le Guin’s, one where there are no heroes, only eulogies, and the poet bears witness to a world long since unbuilt. Sorting the debris from catastrophes both past and present, the poems offer up life as a posthumous daze, wandering along with readers into a future where humans remain beings incapable of reconnecting to the entwined biological systems that mark our planet as unique.
After We All Died renders wars, industrialism, settler colonialism––to name but a few––into a singular, monstrous presence resembling an ecosystem of its own.
“I’m glad it’s Allison Cobb who is coaxing us out of the romance of Whitman’s democracy and into a diary of our last days. She has a sense of humor like Christopher Smart and Bernadette Mayer, and she breezes through the weedy mess that we’ve made of the planet with the grace of Frank O’Hara. This is the book that had to be written, because it’s stunning and also because it leads us to our logical end as poets and people.”—Lisa Jarnot
“Do cancer cells grieve as they devour their body? Would they write poems like these? Closely attuned to the necropoetics of self-extinction, Allison Cobb’s After We All Died offers a series of tender, slyly metal elegies for a human world learning too late that its future is already dead.”—Roy Scranton
“Allison Cobb affirms the lives of all of us: humans, rats, worms, albatross, and e-coli. She will forgive us ourselves and our deaths. She will even count her and our breath for us. She will make us confront the ways we manufacture and encounter death: cancer, bombs, atomic bombs . . . For me the most profound achievement of this books is merging the space between ethics and aesthetics, they are basically the same thing. This is a vast, beautiful, and important book.” —Maged Zaher
“The vulnerable poetics by one of our greatest poets just made the dark embrace a little darker. All the collective denial comes clean in this spectacular new collection by Allison Cobb, making us surprised to find out what we really deserve as the human pelt grows a little paler, a little mangier, “to burn up / everything / for love.” Hold on, but hold onto this book, it’s the best field guide around.” —CAConrad
Cobb’s dystopian sensibility recalls Ursula Le Guin’s, one where there are no heroes, only eulogies, and the poet bears witness to a world long since unbuilt. Sorting the debris from catastrophes both past and present, the poems offer up life as a posthumous daze, wandering along with readers into a future where humans remain beings incapable of reconnecting to the entwined biological systems that mark our planet as unique.
After We All Died renders wars, industrialism, settler colonialism––to name but a few––into a singular, monstrous presence resembling an ecosystem of its own.
“I’m glad it’s Allison Cobb who is coaxing us out of the romance of Whitman’s democracy and into a diary of our last days. She has a sense of humor like Christopher Smart and Bernadette Mayer, and she breezes through the weedy mess that we’ve made of the planet with the grace of Frank O’Hara. This is the book that had to be written, because it’s stunning and also because it leads us to our logical end as poets and people.”—Lisa Jarnot
“Do cancer cells grieve as they devour their body? Would they write poems like these? Closely attuned to the necropoetics of self-extinction, Allison Cobb’s After We All Died offers a series of tender, slyly metal elegies for a human world learning too late that its future is already dead.”—Roy Scranton
“Allison Cobb affirms the lives of all of us: humans, rats, worms, albatross, and e-coli. She will forgive us ourselves and our deaths. She will even count her and our breath for us. She will make us confront the ways we manufacture and encounter death: cancer, bombs, atomic bombs . . . For me the most profound achievement of this books is merging the space between ethics and aesthetics, they are basically the same thing. This is a vast, beautiful, and important book.” —Maged Zaher
“The vulnerable poetics by one of our greatest poets just made the dark embrace a little darker. All the collective denial comes clean in this spectacular new collection by Allison Cobb, making us surprised to find out what we really deserve as the human pelt grows a little paler, a little mangier, “to burn up / everything / for love.” Hold on, but hold onto this book, it’s the best field guide around.” —CAConrad
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2016
65 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 31, 2022
A very close (kinda smooshed up against the glass) approach poetics that moves from personal to political with willy-nilly fuck-you speed that is so satisfying because it’s ruthlessly honest. I might have a special appreciation for Cobb because I’m also the daughter of a physicist fed on cold war cash whose work I’m (still) not allowed to know about… we almost moved to Lost Almost (Los Alamos) in the eighties… now I sort of wish we had… Cobb and I might have met…but I’ll settle for these poems. A ferocious and funny collection that I think non-poetry peeps could love.
February 7, 2017
funny & sad & poignant & perfectly scientific & charged. ecopoetics & the deadness of the future we killed & all. very much loved. read for political poetry course. ((starred review for personal reference, not critical evaluation))
September 5, 2019
The author amazed me if nothing less. My eyes were open to a new form, I want to recommend this to everyone I pass on the street. I read it fast but took my time to highlight and digest many words that I loved. Pass it on and tell a friend or even a stranger, they must read this book this year, if not sooner.
August 7, 2018
One of the best ecopoetry books I've read.
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January 1, 20194.5
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews