Abstract

This review of Haley Singer’s Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead (2023) highlights a work that confronts industrial cruelty with poetic intensity and uncompromising critique. Singer’s essays merge memoir, manifesto, and cultural analysis, using fractured narrative and visceral language to expose the brutal mechanics of meat production and anthropocentric exploitation. The collection deconstructs the sanitized language of industrial meat culture, challenging readers to acknowledge the deep-seated violence in modern food systems and the human complicity therein. Through experimental form and speculative reflection, so the reviewer argues, Singer reclaims the power of narrative as both a tool for remembrance and a call to action. The review situates the work within broader debates on environmental crisis, ethical responsibility, and the transformative potential of writing to reassemble a fragmented world into one of shared vulnerability and hope.

Keywords: animal industry, critical animal studies, animal activism, abandonment, livestock, book review, Haley Singer, creative nonfiction

How to Cite:

Bauer, L. B., (2025) “[Review] Don’t Look Away: On the Restorative Forces of Writing in a Scattered World of Slaughter. Hayley Singer’s Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead. Upswell, 2023, 180pp, Pb, ISBN; 978-0-6455369-9-7.”, Animal Studies Journal 14(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.14453/asj.1563