Boats in the Attic
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.
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
What crawls from the pages of this book is nothing less than dizzying and dynamic, mythic and mind-probing, begging us to question what it means to call a thing by name or to know the world as anything other than mysterious.---Peter Markus, author of When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds
A dying world leader feasts on a small, endangered bird. A 19th century geologist-priest is obsessed with consuming—literally and figuratively—the known world. A series of poems titled 'Missing File' grants the reader access into a forbidden imaginative archive. Alison Powell is a paleontological poet, hellbent on making sense of how the artifacts of the past contextualize our present. With restless curiosity and wit, she interrogates humanity’s fraught relationship with calamitous absence, in which, 'sometimes the banal is transformed by annihilation into the marvelous.' Watch her collapse the distinction between Biblical apocalypse and contemporary extinction, and you’ll see that she’s exactly the poet we need in our uncertain times. What a comfort to have her work amidst our fear.---Nicky Beer
. . .[T]here’s something incredibly refreshing about Alison Powell’s second collection, Boats in the Attic. . . the book not only inhabits our fraught contemporary space without getting bogged down in artistic doom-scrolling, but, more importantly, points a way forward for living when it feels like the End Times have arrived.---Sugar House Review(s)
I.
Missing File #1: Woolly Rhinoceros / Ancient Cavity Tooth | 3
The First Word | 7
Etymology: Heaven | 9
The Great Disappointment, 1844 | 13
Missing File #2: A Few Facts about Bees | 16
The First Deluge: A Found Poem | 18
Mrs. Noah: A Found Poem | 19
Missing File #3: Panthera Leo Leo, Or, A Civics Lesson | 20
The Other, The Other | 26
In the Beginning | 28
II.
If We Speak of the Hurricane | 31
After the Birth of the First Child | 33
The Book of Revelation | 34
Upon Turning Forty | 54
Missing File #4: Already We Are Less than Ever Before | 55
III.
Missing File #5: The Ortolan Bunting | 63
Missing File #6: Horns-a-Plenty | 66
Conditions | 67
Boats in the Attic | 71
Missing File #7: Nomen Nudum | 72
Notes | 85
Acknowledgments | 89
