Allison Cobb

Born Two

ISBN 0-925904-39-2
2004, poetry, 99 pages
$16

from Born Two:

Novel of the little box book

They ride the train through blackened turf. Melinda bitches with gusto. Nick finds it excites him. He leans toward the rise of flesh inside her shirt and she pushes him back. She loves him but knows it isn’t modern, so she punishes, punishes the rotten spot. Pigeons circle the park.

Little box vanish
appear
we’re proud
of her care-
ful careful

Reviews:

To read Born Two is to be in love with One-foot, all treacherous pretty wickedness percolated up through a massacre or two and now artesian with animals. I am proud to say I love One-foot, love not taken for a New Mexican movie in the parlance of Allison Cobb borne of “a book / and in that book / another,” and love true too for Stick and Ellen Alvida Bolin. Born Two is lovely twisted homage to Gertrude but also “Co-operation of Body” and the erotic “down blood creep in me.” Have you read anything so vascular and disarming since when? Listen up: “Nipplery pants come crowing.”
          — Heather Fuller, author of Dovecote

Born Two casts the shadows of Gertrude Stein and Hannah Weiner across the history of the Southwest where the avant-garde abducts a nuclear family into a nuclear era. Allison Cobb has forged a brilliant multi-genre lyrical saga — here is a tender page-turner with a slash and burn bite.
          — Lisa Jarnot, author of Ring of Fire and Some Other Kind of Mission

What happens to a poet born in Los Alamos? Is she born two-headed? two-hearted? two-tongued? Allison Cobb’s Born Two brings monsters out of memory and an unexpected sweetness out of the firestorms of language. Hers is the mind of poetry, driven by history and lured by love, caught in the act of the need to know. She is thinking thinking thinking through these pages, going through all the rooms and cellars, turning the lights on and turning them off, shaking the cages and slamming the doors. Like a child after family secrets, Cobb turns up more truths than the ones she seems to be seeking. Childlike, too, are her characters: One-foot, Rose, Fox and Polar Bear, the “little box book” or b b, whose adventures carry them nearer and nearer the beautiful, erotic, and tragic world of knowledge. Child of history, burning in language: born two.
          — Susan Tichy, author of A Smell of Burning Starts the Day

For this new century, a new poetry of minus signs. Like many of her generation, Allison Cobb’s curious about the wheres, whens and whys of our predicament. Through compression, subtraction, amputation and dispersal, she manages to scrape a hole across the ice on the windshield. “My life in me kept one hook,” she writes, in a passage that borrows Dickinson’s pier glass to stare steadily into the feral eye of the bomb. With the precision of Edward Dorn’s magnificent Gunslinger, Born Two peels away the myths of the American West to reveal the twitchy nerve beneath.
          — Kevin Killian, author of Argento Series