Boats in the Attic (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781531500856)

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.

Author: Alison Powell
ISBN-10: 1531500854
ISBN-13: 9781531500856
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/20/2022
Pages: 102
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.32lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.26d