Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead

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?