After We All Died
After We All Died (2016) confronts a dilemma central to our time: How to live after the end of our future. Through prose essay and lyric poems, the book metabolizes a vast grief for a world that is dying, chipping away at the darkness to see if there is any light up ahead.
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Praise for After We All Died
Poet Allison Cobb’s After We All Died (Ahsahta Press) is thrilling—inventive, visionary, hard-thought, and impossible to put down...Five shining stars and highly recommended.”
—Carolyn Forché, author of In the Lateness of the World
Allison Cobb's After We All Died constructs a new sentence like DNA, short and broad, wrapped and boundless, threading the middle space between prose and verse with lines that extend the voice beyond the boundaries of the body. Facts stack against one another deadly and accurate as bombs, chronicling the hyper-weaponized culture of late capitalism...A sobering, clarifying look at the present moment.
—D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
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, author of While Standing in Line for Death
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, author of A Princess Magic Presto Spell
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, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
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, author of The Consequences of My Body