Plastic: an Autobiography

 Praise for Plastic: an Autobiography

“Plastic is powerful and moving, a deep, personal exploration of the modern world.”

—Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize recipient for The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Plastic: an Autobiography is a spinning gyre of history, biology, poetry, and chemistry, gathering centripetal force through attention to such particulars as a shard of plastic from WWII found lodged in the belly of an albatross sixty years later. This is a fierce and brilliant work that perhaps could only have been written by a poet who grew up in the shadow of Los Alamos, aware that the most destructive of human inventions can seem salvific until it is almost too late. Let this book be a call to awareness and action.

—Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

Allison Cobb's Plastic: an Autobiography is the story of all of our lives. Gripping, informative, and moving, the book is both convicted and convicting, revealing the dirty and the brilliant underpinnings of our modern world. Once I picked it up, I didn't want to put this book down. And when I finished reading, I knew much more about all the things I didn't know I needed to know.

—Camille T Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and Historya

Hybrid in form and in sense of self as a cultural construct, Allison Cobb’s Plastic: an Autobiography gathers shards of story, history, and science, along with bits of plastic left orphaned in the world. She is a daughter of the nuclear age (her father a physicist at Los Alamos) and an environmentalist, giving her voice the authority of lived experience on the edge of our industrial nightmare. Coleridge’s albatross returns here with a belly full of human grief and error.

—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit

 Allison Cobb is not only a dedicated environmentalist, but she is also one of America's most original environmental writers. Plastic: an Autobiography is a profound and poignant story about the entanglements and intimacies between humans, nature, animals, and plastic. The form of this book embodies narrative plasticity as each chapter is molded by history, science, memory, experience, and personal travels through the plasticsphere. After reading the final page, you will never see plastic the same way again, and you will see it everywhere.

—Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold

Cobb carries us on a collective and at times personal journey through environment and time, juxtaposing the persistent nature of industry and convenience against the righteous indignation of the people impacted by it. I found Plastic to be just the reminder that we all need in the fight for climate and environmental justice today. 

—Heather Toney, Senior Director for Moms Clean Air Force and contributing author of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Anyone claiming to have discovered “a new type of book” can practically be dismissed as a cultural illiterate. So, I hereby dismiss myself – in a long train of others to follow! This is absolutely a new kind of book. So much of the fundamental thought of 20th century international vanguard poetics – from exploding of metaphor to exfoliations of metonymy to limit-stretching parataxis, are in Cobb’s masterpiece given play on an expanded field of investigation: a poetic run of 250+ pages! Plastic: an Autobiography is not only a sustained meditation on a “thing,” but a vast array of wormholes towards ethics, metaphysics, and politics. One can’t imagine Walter Benjamin not having been thrilled to examine such an Apollonian commingling of historicity, ideology, and alienated (but regained) wonder at the hyper-material quirkiness of our present epoch.

– Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Charm & The Dread

Part memoir, part history, part philosophical meditation, part environmental poem, Allison Cobb’s Plastic is a matter-of-factual but subtly impassioned plea for us to understand the ubiquity of plastic materials in the recent life of the planet. Juxtaposing vignettes of Kekulé's ouroboros dream of the benzene ring, Stan Ulam and the Manhattan project, Coleridge's albatross and sea birds choked on plastic waste, a mini-ethnography of Gulf coast refinery towns, and so much more, Cobb traces a personal odyssey that eventually finds her attempting to return a plastic Honda Odyssey bumper liner (found on her front lawn in the opening page) to a Honda assembly plant in Alabama (for recycling). That this varied collection of styles, topics, and approaches not only coheres but compels attention is owing to the plasticity of Cobb's unique vision.

—Jeffrey Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History