The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert

'A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery. 'Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory is one of those joyful books that send you to your notebook every page or so, desperate not to lose either the thought the author has deftly placed in your mind or the title of a work she has now compelled you to read. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end-if indeed it will-and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it.Ĭan we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. I’d walk down to the corner store, wearing a mask, feeling a bit apprehensive, and see thirty, thirty-five college kids all shouting across a beer pong table in the same front yard. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. The book was Elisa Gabberts The Unreality of Memory, a travel guide to my summer.

The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate abstraction in her essays. In an essay published in 2018, Elisa Gabbert wrote somewhat presciently, Many experts think the most likely culprit of a future pandemic is some version of the flu. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten-and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily.'* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. 'Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness.

The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert