Synopses & Reviews
FINALIST for the 2022 Oregon Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction
"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
In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb's obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives — from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama — the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.
Review
"In this elegiac missive…Cobb uses a variety of narrative forms to convey her deep despair over how plastic has overwhelmed our planet....There is elegance and power in Cobb's truly unique environmental memoir." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"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 History
Review
"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
About the Author
Allison Cobb (pronouns she/her) is the author of After We All Died, Plastic: an autobiography, Born2, and Green-Wood. Cobb's work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and National Poetry Series; has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa; and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-hosts The Switch reading, art, and performance series and performs in the collaboration Suspended Moment.