Boats in the Attic

By Alison Powell

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1531500854
• ISBN13: 9781531500856
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Length: 102 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"