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.
Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press); Green-Wood (Factory School); Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press EP series). After we all died from Ahsahta Press was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon where she cocurates The Switch, a reading, art, and performance series.
November 10, 2016
