{"product_id":"9781531500856","title":"Boats in the Attic by Alison Powell","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312599970165,"sku":"9781531500856","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781531500856.jpg?v=1762822887","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9781531500856","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}