Description
Product ID: | 9781531500856 |
Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
Country of Manufacture: | GB |
Series: | Poets Out Loud |
Title: | Boats in the Attic |
Authors: | Author: Alison Powell |
Page Count: | 102 |
Subjects: | Poetry, Poetry, Phenomenology and Existentialism, Age groups: children, Phenomenology & Existentialism, Age groups: children |
Description: | Select Guide Rating 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. |
Imprint Name: | Fordham University Press |
Publisher Name: | Fordham University Press |
Country of Publication: | GB |
Publishing Date: | 2022-09-20 |