Imagine your last ever morning. What do you hear? Silence? A moan, a wail, a voice? Nervous voice of a poet, smeared with insects at her eyes, who says Let us descend and so you descend.
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, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age?
Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profit-driven death. In her compelling and 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?
reviews + interviews
Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology
praise for AEH
“These fragmentary but, ultimately, coherent essays insert themselves into consciousness, long after the time required for their reading. Notwithstanding the gruesome, and sometimes gruelling, subject matter, this is a work that rewards bearing witness, a book where attention and looking – looking and looking and not looking away – offers the reader the opportunity for transformation and agency and, perhaps oxymoronically, hope.”
2024 Stella Prize Judge’s Report
“I rarely give five-star reviews, but this fascinating and shocking meditation on the lives and deaths of animals amid the COVID and extinction crises merited it.”
Martin Rowe, Executive Director of Culture & Animals Foundation
“A book of questions as cold and sharp as knives laid out in moonlight.”
Rebecca Giggs (Fathoms: The World in the Whale)
“This is writing that breaks and heaves with the bodies of animals whose infinite torture if presences. Through her facility with language, tone and rhythm, and an unmediated intimacy with her own brokenness in the face of inestimable suffering, Singer is able to bring the reader close to the violence and death that is foreclosed from sight and knowledge.”
Danielle Celermajer (Summertime: Reflections on a vanishing future)
“Channelling a favourite saint, Aelwaer, who stands for rioters, quarellers and troublemakers, Singer’s distinctive and courageous witnessing is a match for our century’s ‘special darkness’.”
Mireille Juchau (The World Without Us)
“Singer’s writing is rigorous and often lyrical and there’s an insistence and urgency that always propel this work and make it deeply compelling, despite its brutal and confronting subject matter.”
Fiona Wright, The Saturday Paper
“… an uncompromising work …”
Steven Carroll, Sydney Morning Herald
“With the fervour of a polemicist and the lyricism of a poet, Singer plunges us into these depths, forces us to look …”
Ben Brooker, Australian Book Review