Abandon Every Hope mournfully investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse and a world motivated by profitable death, to ultimately ask: where does this horror begin and how can it end?
Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote?
Abandon Every Hope is a lament, an elegy, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age?
Across a series of essays, Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profitable death. A compelling debut in poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead, the smell of an egg factory, of multispecies PTSD, of planetary harm and self-harm: of the horror we make on earth. Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?