Elizabeth A. I. Powell - This visionary and innovative novel explores the intersections of representation, desire, prophecy, evangelism, and American consumerism, as it tracks the narrative contained in each photo spread of a J. Crew catalogue

Elizabeth A. I. Powell, Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, Leaky Boat Press, 2019.
elizabethpowellpoetry.wordpress.com/


This visionary and innovative novel explores the intersections of representation, desire, prophecy, evangelism, and American consumerism, as it tracks the narrative contained in each photo spread of a J. Crew catalogue. The chorus of voices, the models, the photographer, the copywriter, as well its main consumer/observer--a US Senator's wife who is obsessed with breeding and bringing a golden calf from an American farm to Israel to bring on the apocalyptic end times--tell the tale of a world beginning to spin on a different axis.





Powell’s Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues takes as its artistic subject the incommensurability of reality and representation. To that end, the novel’s central metaphor is that of religion, a comparison between the texts circulated within mass culture and the familiar holy books of the Christian church. For Powell, the mass-produced and mass-circulated image becomes almost divine for the constituents of a consumer society. As Powell observes, “the Holy Ghost moves words in the copywriter’s mind as he sleeps in his room of burgundy velvet on the East Side of New York City.”
Throughout the book, this metaphor becomes a source of productive tension and complexity, particularly as Powell calls attention to a blurring of boundaries between secular and religious ways of thinking, perceiving, and being in the world. More specifically, Powell reminds us how religious frameworks for meaning-making subtly manifest in secular life, as they are so deeply ingrained in collective memory.
Powell writes, for example, early in the book:
For blessed were Mindy’s diet pills, for they helped to make her free. Blessed are too many diet pills when Mindy stood alone in memory; she therefore blacked out. But here captured on page twelve of the catalogue was the moment when Mindy was at the height of her speeded frenzy, meeting each click of the camera, each click of the speed in her brain with a facial expression so pure, so true, she sold a quarter-million of these dresses.
Here Powell underscores the many ways mass culture equates weight loss with virtue, reminding us that asceticism began as a show of piety. What’s perhaps most revealing about this passage is the behavior of the language, as the work’s central metaphor fittingly dictates tone, cadence, and diction. In such a way, the lyricism of this invocation visibly enacts and performs the transformation of doctrine, as old forms are reconstituted with wildly unexpected and thoroughly modern content.
As Powell herself observes, “She believed in the holy American religion of the Self, although she had not thought it through too deeply.”
... If the act of representation is the most self-conscious of metaphors, then poetic language is a dramatization of the distance between the vehicle and its tenor. After all, there is no metaphor without some degree of separation, that bright aperture between language and its point of reference. Powell and Campanioni show us that in this gap, this fissure, transformation becomes possible. The ascent into the realm of the symbolic, that diction which generates possibility after possibility, becomes, for Powell and Campanioni, a way of destabilizing the familiar architecture of story. As Campanioni tells us, “Storyteller and stagehand; lyrical and expository, theoretical and autobiographical. I want to always be both.” - Kristina Marie Darling
brooklynrail.org/2019/03/books/Beyond-Metaphor-On-Prose-by-Chris-Campanioni-Elizabeth-Powell  


In the mid-1990s, I made a collage out of J. Crew catalogs and hung it on my wall. The only explanation I can give for this behavior is my guilty fascination with what those catalogs were selling: a sunny, casual, vaguely retro vision of trust-fund living. Long before we had "Mad Men" to moon over, we had J. Crew — or, as fashion mecca Into the Gloss puts it, "90s J. Crew Catalogs Are a Normcore Dream."
Elizabeth A.I. Powell gets that. Oh, boy, does she. An associate professor at Northern Vermont University, editor of Green Mountains Review and author of two award-winning volumes of poetry, Powell has titled her first novel Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of J. Crew Catalogues. Whether it qualifies as a novel rather than a long prose poem is up for debate, as is whether J. Crew catalogs qualify as the modern, capitalist equivalents of holy writ. But Powell undeniably nails why those vintage photo spreads inspired such devotion.
Her narrative concerns a series of fictional J. Crew photo shoots in 1998 and 1999. In a series of iconic locales — beach, cape house, campus — photographer Wolfgang Ackerbloom manipulates models Mindy, Helene and Tim in an effort to realize his vision of "sustaining in the present what no longer was, and making that the elixir for being in the unfathomable moment."
Using his camera to evoke 1964 or 1957, Wolfgang is a "traffic director of nostalgia," a "choreographer of moments." Like art, his work is intimate, an effort to come to terms with his own memories. But every image also sells something. Powell reminds us so by periodically writing from the point of view of the catalog's ideal consumer: a middle-aged senator's wife named Kyra Snelling who buys the clothes in an effort to recapture pieces of her own past.
The novel's action is almost entirely internal, floating dreamily from perspective to perspective. While Mindy reconsiders the affair she's having with Wolfgang, the mysterious Helene frets over a feeling that someone's dreaming about her. That dreamer turns out to be the catalog's copywriter, a failed novelist who, like Kyra, is obsessed with Helene as a modern version of a saintly icon.
Finally, in cryptic fragments called "Intermezzos," Powell offers the promised perspective of the Holy Ghost: "I am the mystery of time producing nostalgia. I am the way dreams inform history."
That heightened, poetic diction is typical of the novel's prose as a whole, and a little of it goes a long way. For every perfect phrasing ("that's what she saw in the J. Crew Catalogue, longing set out on the grand table of life"), there's another that feels clunky, overblown or willfully obscure ("Her look summed up the weight of the poetry that narrated a prayer book").
It's hard not to wish the book had been edited down to its lyrical essence — or, alternatively, that Powell had leaned more heavily into a novelistic mode. In some passages, she shows a distinct talent for the comedy of manners, as in her description of the copywriter: "he had a penchant, a true gift, for knowing what would be cool to the average American. He wore baseball caps before everyone wore them like a disease."
More doses of that worldly wit would give Powell's novel a more varied texture. Instead of sustaining such satirical moments, though, she tends to dive back into the numinous, which is a difficult mood to sustain over nearly 200 pages of prose. Recurrent copyediting errors — repeated words, misplaced apostrophes — further complicate the read.
For all of the book's stylistic infelicities, it's not soon forgotten. Powell is spot-on in using J. Crew to show how commerce, nostalgia and desire intertwine in the American imagination. Like Gatsby straining toward the green light that represents his idealized past, Kyra and the copywriter can't stop dreaming of Helene cavorting in a place that is always "a little way up the coast." And the only way to chase that dream is to buy what she's wearing.
The veteran purveyor of pedal pushers and schoolboy blazers may not be so cool these days, but the J. Crew ethos lives on in "aspirational" Instagrams where influencers peddle the latest sweatshop goods. Powell reminds us: caveat emptor. - Margot Harrison
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/quick-lit-concerning-the-holy-ghosts-interpretation-of-j-crew-catalogues-by-elizabeth-powell/Content?oid=26757241




Elizabeth A.I. Powell’s new novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretations of J.Crew Catalogues, uses the worlds within and around the pages of J.Crew catalogues to imagine a convoluted story of desire, nostalgia, storytelling, and consumerism.
The novel alternates between sections told from the points of view of a variety of characters in the J.Crew orbit, including a catalogue photographer, Wolfgang, and two models, Mindy and Helene; a dedicated J.Crew catalogue shopper named Kyra; and a daydreaming catalogue copywriter named Steven. Interspersed between these chapters are short passages from the point of view of the Holy Ghost, who serves as a kind of chorus-like meta-narrator.
J.Crew catalogues are full of carefree people romping on beaches, lounging in well-appointed houses, and staring off into dreamy, sunlit distances. This novel plays with the way the catalogues, through these images, tell stories of wistful longing, almost-fulfilled desires, hope, and promise.
The models who pose in the photos, the photographer who aims his lens and lust at them, and the copywriter who makes sense of the images with well-wrought phrases and words all work together to create these stories. And, in turn, the consumer, with her own swirling desires and needs, consummates these acts of storytelling by buying the jackets or bags or sunglasses that most speak to her.
It’s a postmodern network of interrelated cultural forces, and Powell’s novel skillfully engages the reader both in the individual stories and in the book’s overarching and often humorous critique of late capitalism.
One of the novel’s themes is the constant and inevitable tension between the real world and the constructed one, and the ways that those two worlds can never really be untangled. As we hear in a chapter devoted to the creation of Page 22 in the 1998 summer catalogue, the photographer Wolfgang “wanted everything to be a testimony to what he saw as the evaporation of things that tried to hold onto the nucleus of now.”
For this particular page, Wolfgang’s attempting to create, as he says, “the appearance of two famous women taking a break during a Cape Cod artists’ retreat.” He makes sure that the light and atmosphere are just so, trying to capture the story that he sees in his head. At the same time, he’s thinking about the relationship that’s developed between himself and one of the models, Mindy. Mindy, too, we hear, is caught up in this relationship, while the slightly older and wiser Helene holds back and watches what’s happening between Wolfgang and Mindy.
There’s an elaborate back and forth between fiction and reality, with layer upon layer of desire and disillusionment. The characters themselves often can’t tell whether their emotions and interactions are part of the scenes they’re constructing or the actual, physical world. The boundaries between the fictional and the real are purposefully blurred, both for the characters and for the reader.
In other sections, the copywriter, Steven, studies the images produced by Wolfgang and nurtures a quiet obsession with Helene. He, too, is caught up in various fantasies, and he, too, participates in fostering them.
A former would-be novelist, Steven prefers, in fact, not knowing what Wolfgang intends with the images; he likes, instead, to create his own stories. He taps into his own imagination and desires to create stories—albeit in the service of marketing J.Crew products—on the page. We hear, for instance, that Steven

wanted the words of his copy to capture how things unfolded as the page turned toward the sequined white silk evening dress. A thin sheaf of words was what he needed to describe this eventuated longing where in last night’s dream he traversed the great sand—as heavy as Siberian snow—pushing a wheelbarrow filled with his waking life. He had tried to go toward the place where his longing met the precise point where it was met by a force equal to it. A little way up the coast.

For Steven, writing catalogue copy is a way to tell stories in which he is both a participant and an observer, both the desirer and the desired.
The final stage in the catalogue’s journey is Kyra, who pulls it out of the mailbox, opens its glossy pages, and finds herself drawn into its fantastical worlds. Ultimately, she orders items that carry the weight and meaning of those worlds—products that give her the sense that she’s living out the stories the catalogue creates. We hear that the catalogues help her to “believe in the power of longing”:

And that’s what she saw in the J.Crew catalogue, longing set out on the grand table of life. It was a language she could understand. Her desire was never satiated, but seemed to grow with each picture or view she looked at.

She’s the perfect consumer, willing to suspend her disbelief long enough to feel herself entering the scenes depicted on the pages, and then understanding that in order to truly be present in the scenes, she must buy the products in them.
The novel’s story culminates in a party where the characters end up crossing paths, interacting, sharing beds, and otherwise becoming a part of each others’ real lives. As novel’s taught us, however, real lives are never just that—they’re always shaped and inflected by fantasy. It’s a complicated ending in which the characters find that perhaps both their fantasies and their realities are illusory.
The Holy Ghost, who lends a peculiar touch of ethical and spiritual analysis and judgment in the interstitial chapters, seems to want, among other things, for the characters to find love. One enigmatic chapter in the Holy Ghost’s voice, for instance, says “love is my only hope, my thickest grief.” True, meaningful, non-consumeristic love is something that eludes the characters in the novel, but the Holy Ghost, at least, seems to hope it can happen.
Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of J.Crew Catalogues is a light-hearted, postmodern tale of consumerism and desire. In some ways, it feels nostalgic itself, since we’re deep into a digital era that’s seen the near-demise of traditional print catalogs. The internet, though, is a catalog on steroids, giving us an infinite number of pages, images, and stories ripe for the scrolling. In this sense, the novel feels prescient and timely, since perhaps we’re only now starting to understand the power, promise, and danger of images selling always-just-out-of-reach dreams. - Vivian Wagner
- heavyfeatherreview.org/2019/03/26/powell/




Kristina Marie Darling:  Your forthcoming novel, Concerning The Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, makes impressive use of lyricism, performative language, and metaphor as a structural device. What can else fiction writers learn from poets about the craft of writing?
Elizabeth A.I. Powell:  Universal and personal dramas are one, at least according to the French poet Pierre Reverdy. I’m interested in that meeting point. The question is how do you enact that idea or truth in a work of fiction in a way that is not plot driven. “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” uses poetic device as a way to enact the feeling and performance of the social zeitgeist of a society gone mad in religious zealotry and consumerism, as a way to tell a personal story that goes beyond the development of situation.
Metaphor is a way to think about how we can explain the unexplainable to the other; to the one we want to be understood by in a human and spiritual sense. Metaphor or trope also enacts in a fundamentally different way than plot. I was interested in going beyond a character driven plot, and tried to evoke a plot that was driven by metaphor, performative language, and lyricism. Poetry, by definition, is defined as “a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response.”
Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher and literary critic spoke of poetry as the “literature of depth,” of memory and daydream. It’s not that prose can’t be driven by memory, look at Milan Kundera’s work for instance, but that fiction is the situation of memory, poetry is the enactment of memory in language. Critical theorist Jonathan Culler, who I don’t always understand, once said something I think is extremely helpful in thinking about form, that perhaps poetics is just ”a mystery religion without a firm gospel, a study of things that tries to find a systematic theory of literature, to discover structures and conventions which enable individual works to have meaning.”
These ideas were foremost on my mind when I was writing the novel. I studied Milan Kundera’s work in general, but his book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in particular. As well, I stood as close as I could to Mark Costello’s genius and sometimes overlooked but magnificent collection of stories, “The Murphy Stories.”
Another big influence on my writing and life has been the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. The high lyricism that the book evokes, makes me feel as if language and sound are pushing history forward by a force greater than narrative, a force that narrative is made of. I believe this force is the ultimate act of creativity found in what Christianity calls the Holy Spirit. I wanted to write a book that was conscious of and calling out to that force. I was interested in how that force might consciously and spiritually interact with consumer driven characters in search of a more glorious and understandable life in the book.
Poetic devices like assonance and alliteration can develop a propulsive rhythm to the language of fiction, imitating physical phenomena. The use of performative language in the book was yet another way to move the social and spiritual aspects of the plot. Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues brings together the ways in which social action, religion, art, and consumerism push forward on history. - Kristina Marie Darling
read more here



Elizabeth A.I. Powell, The Republic of Self, New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2001.

The Republic of Self is a meditation on both the public and private American self. Elizabeth Powell's serious yet sexy and entertaining poems attempt to reconcile the divisions, diversions, and prospects of the self as we know it. Throughout her spirited investigation the poet enlists poems in prose––within the larger, more lyrical narration––to comment on the self's predicament, much as one of Shakespeare's fools might comment upon a play. Indeed, the self is a fool of sorts, as the poems infer through their wit, gravity, wistfulness, and desires. The Republic of Self becomes a field guide to all that lives within: nymphs, satyrs, Greco-Roman gods, even the icons of mass media and government are here in this, our forever new/old republic still inventing itself. Elizabeth Powell brings us a wise, outrageous, and surprisingly tender view of who we are.

“Nothing quite like her in American poetry––Elizabeth Powell is a mischievous, melancholy, funny, metaphysical and ironic ecstacist, a kind of up-dated Fernando Pessoa for our troubled and dear republic. Her brain is full of sexy calibrations, her heart vulnerable to mood swings and grievous truths, her world lush with both the visible and the invisible. What a great new voice, streaming with imagination and verve.” —David Rivard

“There's so much right in this book, so much spirit and intelligence and personal and mythic and historical imagination, that its many poetic surprises come to seem absolutely inevitable, its rigor and its hard-earned truths essential, its absolute command of artifice perfectly natural: it's the kind of book that seems to have always been there, only waiting for us finally to arrive.” - C.K. Williams

Pledge

Republic, your cool hands
On my schoolgirl shoulders.
Not sure what allegiance meant
Until the vows were held by heart,
By memory, by rote, by benign betrothal.
Republic, you were mine, I knew
Because of Mother’s religious pamphlets:
Lindsay for Mayor.
McGovern for President.
How to Register Voters.
I didn’t ever want to go to school
On Saturdays. The baby-sitter said
If Nixon won, I’d have to go. Me,
Your most cherished child bride.
I wanted a white communion dress
Like the ones the Catholic girls wore.
Republic, you know I wanted to play
Cards with Mother. Mother smoking
Marlboros, watching Watergate all week.
Citizen Mother all consumed at that confessional.
I liked the name Betsy Ross.
I liked the idea of sewing flags.
I liked the tattered textbook about the colonies.
So tender, so tender. My Republic,
I am pledged by my childish troth
So strangely to you.

Elizabeth A. I. Powell, Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, Anhinga Press, 2016.
www.willylomansrecklessdaughter.com/


"Elizabeth Powell's theatrical book of poems plays out against the backdrop of Arthur Miller's signature play, which is at once a guidepost and a foil for this drama of the self, this poetic meditation on the intermixed American family. Powell's self-correcting poems are smart and high-spirited, vacillating wildly between feelings, between lyric and prose, moving in a short space from high comedy to dark grief. I can't think of another book of poems that is quite like WILLY LOMAN'S RECKLESS DAUGHTER, which keeps bravely crossing 'the line no one wants to write or live.'"—Edward Hirsch


"Rarely in American poetry do we see the psyche turned loose with the kind of unrestrained wildness in Liz Powell's new collection Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter. In a textual mixture of memoir, mythology, lyric poetry, andpostmodern interrogations, Powell makes aflying leap into the theatrical realities of her family history and her own identity. The background of this ambitious poem is America.
Powell's often brilliant dislocations and ventriloquisms have a mad velocity, abundant creative cunning, and aspire to a compassionate vision of all the characters in the theatrical chaos of one family's life. Or as she says, with a characteristic panopticon-style logic: "The whole of America is a poem on how to read Death of a Salesman." This is a wild, entertaining and ambitious book.:
-Tony Hoagland

"Put Liz Powell’s book on your must list. It’s smart, bountiful word-luscious poems explore the fractious connections between daughters and parents, and men and women, and actors and audience, with a daredevil’s brio and a philosopher’s introspection; and the ambitious long poem that revisits/extends/unpacks “Death of a Salesman” is surely one of the finer pieces to come from Powell’s generation of poets. It’s a book to not just read, but to live in for a while."-Albert Goldbarth

"These poems are pure METHOD, pure MADNESS: i.e. truth uncoupled from truth's invarience, self-evidence, and relativity.  Powell is daughter, mother, and x-wife, and the f-ing man: Miller and Miesner and Baron and Strasberg (and Strasberg) and Stanislavski and Diderot and Duse and Boleskavsky and Adler and Rowlands and, yeah, a little Loman, too."-Olena Kalytiak Davis


"Whether constructing a metaphysical set design or deconstructing the human body into a question mark, Elizabeth Powell is an alchemist of  letters. This book is a reminder of how many forms the poem can take--not only textually, but in the mind, the physical body and the spirit."-Melissa Broder


"Elizabeth Powell brilliantly mines the psychodynamics of family life in WILLY LOMAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER. These ambitious and deeply felt poems cohere through Powell’s innovative adaptation of that mythic American narrative, Death of a Salesman. Powell’s gift for strange and stunning turns of phrase and unexpected off-rhymes energizes the collection, and the recurring themes and motifs enhance its cumulative power."-Deborah Landau


From its introductory high-flying, free-wheeling, wildly-penned lyric essay to its final elegy in somber rhymed couplets; with its plays within poems and its prose within plays; with its kaleidoscopes and side-trips and its one woman producer-director who shines in her own theater of the imagination, Elizabeth Powell’s Willy Loman’s Restless Daughter defies genre categorizations in so many ways, it may be invited to dwell at the top of a mountain in a land so mysterious and so magical, with sun bouncing off its spires and mirrors and roller coasters, that we who are tethered below and lucky enough to enter its pages in wonder, can only call it brilliant. — Maureen Seaton, Judge, 2015 Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry
Elizabeth Powell’s theatrical book of poems plays out against the backdrop of Arthur Miller’s signature play, which is at once a guidepost and a foil for this drama of the self, this poeticmeditation on the intermixed American family.  Powell’s self-correcting poems are smart andhigh-spirited, vacillating wildly between feelings, between lyric and prose, moving in a shortspace from high comedy to dark grief.  I can’t think of another book of poems that is quite like Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter, which keeps bravely crossing “the line no one wants to write or live.” — Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel: A Poem

Rarely in American poetry do we see the psyche turned loose with the kind of unrestrained wildness in Liz Powell’s new collection, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter. In a textual mixture of memoir, mythology, lyric poetry, and postmodern interrogations, Powell makes a flying leap into the theatrical realities of her family history and her own identity. The background of this ambitious poem is America.

Powell’s often brilliant dislocations and ventriloquisms have a mad velocity, abundant creative cunning, and aspire to a compassionate vision of all the characters in the theatrical chaos of one family’s life. Or as she says, with a characteristic panopticon-style logic, “The whole of America is a poem on how to read Death of a Salesman.” This is a wild, entertaining and ambitious poem. — Tony Hoagland, author of Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
Put Liz Powell’s book on your must list. It’s smart, bountiful word-luscious poems explore the fractious connections between daughters and parents, and men and women, and actors and audience, with a daredevil’s brio and a philosopher’s introspection; and the ambitious long poem that revisits/extends/unpacks Death of a Salesman is surely one of the finer pieces to come from Powell’s generation of poets. It’s a book to not just read, but to live in for a while. — Albert Goldbarth, author ofSelfish



Sample Poems
 
SET DESIGN: WHAT THE DOOR KNOWS
The door is clairvoyant. It doesn’t need the fingerprints
to know. The door knows whom the unknown will shroud next,
its rust creaking hinge pontificating. No one understands
just how much this door knows. Its lintel provides a hint:
Weary is the man who knows his fate.
 
The door’s every rumbling atom fueling
each seismic prophecy. If you breach
this doorway, beware of treading on its sill;
carefully turn its burning handle clockwise.
This door made of nails and glue, smooth white paint,
 
a lock that always sticks. This door discerns the dates
of all who pass. It knows the manner and details
of your death. It screeches its witness. You will know it
by the lead paint chips flaking from its frame,
and it will grant your coming or going before you do.
 
TRAVELING SALESMAN IN PROVIDENCE
His character weighed on a balancing scale, suspended between null and void.
 
He couldn’t desert his wife despite her spite. His mistress, half his age,
 
required Viagric stamina. He didn’t want to strap her
 
to an old man, who’d soon grow bald and foolish. The facts swelled
 
his aorta, sped his blood toward its restless dying. The autumn air
 
smelled of allegory, a foreshadowing before curtains draw shut.
 
CNN blued his room with its bituminous glow. He grappled
 
the aging man’s cliché, wrestled at forty, a mood —
 
What was the world coming to? His High Mass of Selling
 
became a weary road. Dazed by the tube, the same old Chinese food,
 
he hungered to elect a new life, but the spicy stir-fry of what-might-be
 
gave him heartburn. His arches killing him, perspiration quenched the dread.
 
At first, he assumed — panic attack — uncertainty’s impending doom,
 
narrowing the stage and scene, his hotel room.
 
The Haitian cleaning lady helped him to the lobby from his bed
 
to await the ambulance; it wasn’t heartburn or in his head.
 
His inaccuracies left him dangling; his secrets, sweet and accidental,
 
cost him all he claimed. He no longer believed in the God of optimism.
 
A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man. He’d sell the same
 
wholesale wreck, the same story in Boston for now. He watched
 
the meltdown of his inner-core from the theater of his brain.
- www.anhingapress.org/poetry/willy-lomans-reckless-daughter-or-living-truthfully-under-imaginary-circumstances

Prologue 

Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly,

fluttering like a silk-moth behind me

 

blocking my life, my scenes

in whichever stage direction she wants.

 

Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me,

her ringing calls like an imperial decree.

 

When she sleeps she crashes, like a car

into the guardrail of my ambition.

 

Her curse like a poison I cannot smell,

an asphyxiation of the self by the self, that hell and hard sell.

 

Split personalities, we dream through the night,

of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light,

 

Not even my husband can feel

her there between us—a secret contract under seal.

 

When I awaken, her irises touch mine;

an awful, indecipherable fault line.

 

She’s a character in search of an author, a devotee,

trying to recount her history through me,

 

until I channel her. She’s like a phantom limb,

hymn to the invisible. Her shameless whims,

 

the subtext of my lies. Under her tinted hair

the forest murmurs, becomes a thought, or prayer.

 

Until her thoughts tumble into mine;

colors bleed. In the morning, I’m overwrought—

 

My patrilineal kin, she begins to wear thin,

when she undoes hospital corners I’ve tucked so gently in.

 

Her cool white rising is meringue completing—

the high-pitched silence of our congealing.

 

She was always ceremonially unfolding

his white shirts, unpressing the folds

 

in my circumstance. I did and didn’t want her. I kept

trying to catch her, then let her slip. Any intent

 

to have her near made her more invisible. Her electric

breasts overfilled my brassieres. An interaction, our dialectic—

 

She never removes her hat upon entering the door

to my personality. Ma semblable, ma soeur!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/146947/willy-loman39s-reckless-daughter

Death of a Salesman casts a theatrical shadow over this wildly thoughtful collection, Elizabeth A. I. Powell’s second after The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner. A Vermonter since 1989, her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, and other places. She teaches at Johnson State College and is editor of Green Mountains Review.

HOW TO SEW AN UNHEMMED DAY

Can you gather in sorrow’s excess stratosphere? Evenly baste
the sky’s regret? Do you know how to smock diminishment?
Embroider your way out? Have you a thimble? Check
in your little mending kit. Don’t despair to protect yourself,
how about scissors to sever the binding thread? Clearly
you’ve lost your instruction
book and pattern.

Soon the night will unstitch from the sky’s protective net,
this unrepairable blue, cloaking you in
blackness.

You won’t remember the smell of your hair,
the curve of your waist.
Where are your spectacles?

Stitch quickly,
before the swatch of aquamarine fades.

  -  Matt Sutherland
www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/willy-lomans-reckless-daughter-or-living-truthfully-under-imaginary-circumstances/


From the onset, Elizabeth A.I. Powell’s Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances questions the reality of the words on the page and the understanding of the world in which we exist. While each poem enhances the narrative of the next, Powell creates a work of literature than can be picked up at your leisure or read in an entire sitting. At times there is both freedom and structure to the words on the page, while at other times the poems are crafted with narrative reminiscent of a short story.  Powell uses Death of a Salesman as a model for framing her poetry in life, death, and actuality.  Her statement of the unspoken parallel of the absent versus the known is representative in her questions of truth and the implications of the obscure.  Carrying across the idea of a dual existence, there is always the question of who? She writes:

So, I say it.  My double, my sister: we are engaging in an energy
event.  I am disassociating into you.  God is an actor acting on us: You
are inventing me and I am inventing you.  Where have you been?  I say.
Where have you been? You say.

The stories make the reader marvel whether she or the other may be the motivation for the manifestation and creation of literature, drama, and life. Always questioning, Powell tackles death’s totality and truth of the effects of a non-existence as she writes, “The object of our attention is this dream that turns out to be real./ The object of our attention is at once the object of our attention and also ourselves.” Her prose continually treats the external and the internal, challenging us to ignore the truth of their present duality.  She continues later writing, “[s]ometimes you try to deny my existence, but today please come/flying so we may live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”  She never allows us to forget the designs and intentions of the interwoven thematic issues of the absent and the known when she asks the other to come flying with her into imaginary circumstances.

There is a culmination of imaginary circumstance as Powell ends her book with its namesake, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter,” as structure and rhyme are birthed from the chaos and questioning that have lead up to this final act.  She tackles this idea from the viewpoint of a child of passion, this unknown bastard, she writes, “O, Willy Loman, I’m your reckless daughter, your memento mori./ I’ll never be a character in your authorized story,/the one that brought you fame.”  The continued treatment of truth versus authenticity is maintained as we see this unfamiliar personality treat Willy Loman as a construction of veracity.  He is the known and the glorified while she is the unknown and the repressed.  This idea of questioning true existence begins with the first poem of the book and culminates into the stunning final magnum opus.  As the book ends, there is no doubt we are sold on the idea of this creation, this unwritten circumstance of Willy Loman’s implied indiscretions of infidelity.  It is the birth of the unreal, a question of authenticity, and a depth of meaning to a story we may have not known.  The reader is left mourning for the loss of someone whose entire existence is a question of authenticity and repression.  Powell’s poems whisper quietly in our ears, challenging us to deny this unwritten reality. - Steven Seum

http://www.jetfuelreview.com/elizabeth-a-i-powells-willy-lomans-reckless-daughter.html
​

Elizabeth Powell retells the family psychodrama in her brilliant second book, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter, or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances. Exploring identity through the lens of the theater, Powell uses Arthur Miller’s iconic play “Death of a Salesman” to ground her ambitious poems. The collection’s subtitle refers to the Meisner acting technique, which encourages actors to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Through a series of acting games, Powell’s speakers experience trauma, flashback, repetition, and eventual self-discovery: “We hold our lives like a playbill.../ We (I) walk stage after stage, each act a compass aiming true north.”
Powell’s opening lyric essay, “Autocorrecting the Lyric I,” tries to reconcile her parents’ intermarriage through the new typing technology of autocorrect. Stuttering and fragmented, she morphs into multiple identities, part-Jew, part-WASP: “Let’s say I’m a fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white ... I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage. I’m the debutante in the Pogrom.” When Powell recasts her father as tragic hero Willy Loman, the aging traveling salesman failed by the American dream, she reimagines herself as a brand-new character: “I am Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter...” Through a wild fusion of memoir and myth, Powell’s family story becomes a conversation with postmodern America:


Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly,

Fluttering like a silk-moth behind me…


Split personalities, we dream through the night,
            
Of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light...”

The rhyming couplets move gracefully from comedy to tragedy and back, calculating father-daughter disappointments and the soulless deals of consumerism. “I am the exchange, the wheel,/ the scent of money...” Powell declares in her closing tour de force. Her entire book is a poem for our fractured world, where the “God of the almighty dollar” rules and our chaotic selves and family ghosts converse on stage until the curtain falls. - Diana Whitney
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Poetry-by-Dean-Rader-Elizabeth-Powell-Jenny-10970203.php


The New Yorker "Books We Love 2016"   http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-books-we-loved-in-2016
Verse, Review by Nancy Mitchell, http://versemag.blogspot.com/2017/01/


The Florida Review, Review by Dana Roeser, https://floridareview.cah.ucf.edu/article/the-double-under-the-bed/
Poetry Northwest, Review by Kary Wayson.   http://www.poetrynw.org/elizabeth-powells-willy-lomans-reckless-daughter/
Sugarhouse Review, Review by Jamie Wendt, https://sugarhousereviews.blogspot.com/2017_02_01_archive.html
Vermont Public Radio Interview with Elizabeth Powell about Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter    http://digital.vpr.net/post/vermont-poet-elizabeth-powell-explores-death-salesman-feminist-perspective#stream/0
Review in Washington Independent Review of Books by Grace Cavalieri: http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/september-2016-exemplars-poet-ry-reviews-by-grace-cavalieri
Review in Ploughshares by Matthew Lippman:
http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/review-willy-lomans-reckless-daughter-or-living-truthfully-under-imaginary-circumstances-by-elizabeth-powell/
Interview in The Common with S. Tremaine Nelson:
http://www.thecommononline.org/features/drama-will-interview-elizabeth-i-powell

The Best American Poetry Blog, Review by Anna Maria Hong
http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/11/the-sonnet-three-journals-and-four-graces-by-anna-maria-hong.html
Review in Rain Taxi
http://www.raintaxi.com/volume-21-number-4-winter-2016-84/

Review in Vol.1 Brooklyn, by Tobias Carroll
http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2017/01/18/permutations-mutations-and-new-ballads-thoughts-on-three-literary-remixes/

Accolades as Top Editor, Best American Poetry Blog
 http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/08/the-poet-as-editor-elizabeth-powell.html
Interview with Julianna Baggott on her Blog
http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/2016/10/12-dozen-for-elizabeth-powell_30.html
Review in The Rusty Toque by Kateri Lanthier
http://www.therustytoque.com/poetry-review-kateri-lanthier.html
Review in Jet Fuel Review by Steven Seum http://www.jetfuelreview.com/elizabeth-a-i-powells-willy-lomans-reckless-daughter.html
Review in VT Seven Days
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/book-review-willy-lomans-reckless-daughter-elizabeth-powell/Content?oid=3702423
Interview in The Book Jam
https://thebookjamblog.com/tag/willy-lomans-reckless-daughter/
Article in The Vermont Cynic
https://vtcynic.com/34033/arts/professor-pursues-the-truth-in-poetry/




The Drama of the Will: an Interview with Elizabeth A. I. Powell