Overview

Boats in the Attic is a sweeping, poignant exploration of what it means to be an individual and, in particular, what it means to be a parent of young children, in our current time of crisis. Errands must be run, the radio plays, and the child wants the birthday girl's balloon-all while sea levels are rising and wild wolves roam the acres of Chernobyl, ""developing a cryptography to a century / to which we are not invited."" In this dynamic collection, Powell intersperses lyric flight and prose fragments with metacommentary, nuance, and a beguiling sense of humor. At the same time, these pieces are securely tethered to the material difficulties of being a human in today's world, where a child must participate in a lockdown drill at his preschool and a dying woman turns to Reddit to fund her efforts to be cryogenetically preserved. Conversations between the speaker and her children trace the beauty and terror of existential indeterminacy: ""We begin to consider other planets - / Will they have us?"" In a long piece titled ""Book of Revelation,"" the speaker dreams that ""below the bed / is an encyclopedia of lost things,"" a phrase that captures the collection's wide range and its categorizing eye. Powell turns to astronomy, Alice in Wonderland, Millerism, and culinary cruelty, with a uniquely celebratory and elegiac voice, all in an effort to understand the depths, and effects, of the human appetite for pleasure, power, and escape.

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9781531500856

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Reviews

Alison Powell's Boats in the Attic weaves the personal and intimate with religion, history, ecology, and etymology, criss-crossing these threads until they are difficult to tease apart--and who would want to? The tangle is the truth. This is a brilliant book.---Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod,

Author Information

Alison Powell is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University. Her other collections include a chapbook titled The Art of Perpetuation and a collection of poetry titled On the Desire to Levitate. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review, PBS NewsHour, poets.org, A Public Space, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others.

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