The Art of Perpetuation
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Literary Nonfiction. Vivid explorations of cryogenics, lion baiting, iDollators, dodo birds, SpaceX, and more populate THE ART OF PERPETUATION, a poignant new collection of lyric essays from Alison Powell that troubles the boundaries between human and animal, living and dead, man and woman, adult and child. These nine whip-smart essays juxtapose personal narrative--memories of the author's childhood growing up in southern Indiana and experiences as a mother of two--with scientific, historical, and cultural narrative. Throughout the collection, Powell seeks to unearth, to peel back, to lay bare: To pry something out of someone, the meat of a walnut from its enamel-like shell, is an excavation--to uncover a lie, an infidelity. Dizzying, fragmentary, and provocative, Powell's lyrical investigations dig in deep, coming up for air only to expose the meaningless of naming in a world obsessed with self-perpetuation. To say a poem is like a body is to say one's self is a machine. To say a body is erasable is to say extinction is a temperate clicking... And like that, with one hand on the glass and one gloved hand inside the mouth of the woolly rhino, you have done it.
Alison Powell's THE ART OF PERPETUATION is a Mobius strip of macro and micro that remakes the Oxford English Dictionary into a murder mystery and organizes the kaleidoscope of the natural world into an occult circuit board. In these pages, we encounter the archeological Red Lady who wasn't one at all, the dreaming Elon Musk and his Ray Bradbury cloak of sci-fi improbability, and the reverend geologist who ate the heart of Louis XIV and declared that he, 'like all men of science, know s] the body because of women and criminals.' Powell is a wizard of history and metaphorical precision, and imbues her elusive subjects with unsettling magnetism, whether it's Aristotle arguing that the city is organic, 'which is like saying cruelty is organic, ' or her compelling high school bully, who lives in her brain 'and sparkles with her violence, ' much like these dazzling, prismatic lyric essays.--Simeon Berry
THE ART OF PERPETUATION is an extended meditation that considers the slipperiness of images. From the archives of dolls to Louis XIV's preserved heart to personal memories, which are merely images embedded in the psyche, the reader is gifted with a contemplative poetic. This book interrogates how histories, persons, places, and things slowly fade from our present view and leave in their stead wonder, awe, human connection, identitarian query, or ontological mystery. Powell shows us the mind of a scholar, maker, and thinker who can simultaneously hold the answers and the questions. This is writing at its best and most compelling. THE ART OF PERPETUATION is a book any writer worth their words will read and wish they wrote.--Airea D. Matthews
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