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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
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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
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