Allison Cobb

Poetry as ecstatic geology

On Susan Tichy's 'North|Rock|Edge'

Allison Cobb
Coastline at Score Head, Shetland Islands. Photo by John Allan via Wikimedia Commons.

The place of arrival is an opening, “this rough coast a gate.” Nothing here is certain (“not map, no compass rose”) or still, the edges undefined. The invitation is just this: to arrive and to dwell in this uncertainty and motion; to look and not to “miss a single / wave’s decay” (3).

Susan Tichy’s latest collection opens with an invitation:

Arriving, Stand Still
if you can, haul-to within
the terms of anguish[1]

The place of arrival is an opening, “this rough coast a gate.” Nothing here is certain (“not map, no compass rose”) or still, the edges undefined. The invitation is just this: to arrive and to dwell in this uncertainty and motion; to look and not to “miss a single / wave’s decay” (3).

New writing through the Anthropocene

PennSound podcast #63: Allison Cobb and Brian Teare with Julia Bloch, Knar Gavin, and Aylin Malcolm

PennSound podcasts
Book covers for Brian Teare's Doomstead Days and Allison Cobb's Green-Wood.

Allison Cobb and Brian Teare joined Julia Bloch, Knar Gavin, and Aylin Malcolm in the Wexler Studio on April 2, 2019, following their lunchtime discussion with scholars and poets from Penn’s Poetry and Poetics and Anthropocene and Animal Studies reading groups. Our discussion ranged from human embeddedness in the nonhuman world to the role of affect in poetry that seeks to reckon with ever intensifying ecodisasters.

June 17, 2019

On the central tensions of being

An interview between Christy Davids and Allison Cobb

Allison Cobb
Christy Davids
Photo of Allison Cobb (left) by Kerry Davis.

Note: Allison Cobb is the author of four books, most recently After We All Died, which was published by Ahsahta in late 2016. Her poetry is invested in locating the self in the landscape of the world, and does so with an eye toward ecology and an ear toward music. Her work incorporates research, considers historical and scientific contexts, and regularly plays with the boundaries of poetry and essay. 

August 1, 2017

'It has a place for me as living'

On Susan Landers's 'Franklinstein'

Allison Cobb
Photo courtesy of Natasha Dwyer.

Franklinstein began as a mash-up of two classic US texts: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. It was an inspired move, to juxtapose the plainspoken, aphoristic words of a founding father with the modernist novel written by a Jewish, lesbian expat who sought to dismantle and redefine concepts of “the new world” and literature itself.

R.U. Sirius

Amy Catanzano
The dog door to the observatory projecting a live-feed of Sirius
The dog door on the observatory projecting a live-feed of the dog star Sirius from a telescope mounted on the roof of The Franklin Institute. From Demetrius Oliver's installation, Canicular, at The Print Center in Philadelphia.

It is not every day that after your science-oriented literary reading that you, the other writers who read, and the audience climb through a dog door into a small, astronomical observatory that was constructed in the art gallery where the reading took place to see a live-feed projection of the dog star Sirius — the brightest star in the night sky and so nicknamed due to its containment in the constellation, Canis Major — from a telescope mounted on the roof of a nearby science education center.

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