Description
Book Synopsis"Powerful ...full of dark nostalgia."--Nathan Englander The Lifeboat All night in his lifeboat my father sang to keep the voices of the other men who cried in the wreckage from reaching him, he sang what he knew of the requiem, of the hit parade and the bits of hymns, he sang until he would never sing again, scalding his raw throat with sea-water until his ribs heaved, until the salt wept from his eyes on dry land, flecked at his lips in his squalling rages, streaked the sheets in his night sweats as night after night the reassembled ship scattered its parts on the shore of his bed, and the lifeboat eased him out again to drown each night among singing men. Inspired by a shipwreck endured by her father during the Second World War, and by his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and eventual suicide, Inheritance is a powerful poetic debut by the winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest and The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.
Trade Review"Powell's poems are full of lively vignettes in which realism strikes lyrical sparks off harshness."--Times Literary Supplement "If you are willing to submerge yourself, you may see and hear something both dangerous and divine."--Arc Poetry Magazine "[Powell's] description is beautiful and tender...the land of elegy overlaps the land of dream."--The Fiddlehead
Table of ContentsInheritance Seals Silver Devils Fallowfield Station Whiskey Mantra Lifeboat Ghost Lake Muskrat The Encounter At Piraeus Song for a Sleeping Father Rain Dance Negative Theology Saint Sebastian Ooh-La-La Big Spender Respite The Rich To My Creditors Family Jewel Curse of the Magdalene Rubric Skinnydipping The Girls Who Work at the Makeup Counter Appearances Jig The Well Mirror Lake Two Views of a Stag Perdita Tantum Ergo Get with Child a Mandrake Root Bernadette The Emporer Fandango Song for a Smoke-Filled Room Malefic Inhuman The Other Grandmother Russian Brides Hensol The Wreckage Florilegia
