Atomizer by Elizabeth A. I. Powell reviewed by Kerrin McCadden

Atomizer by Elizabeth A. I. Powell

Publisher ‏ : ‎ LSU Press (September 9, 2020)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 108 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807173908

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807173909

Review by: Kerrin McCadden 

……………….Let the atomizer release the top notes of my story, that which evaporates most

……………….quickly. Let the atomizer do what it does best: release the distance between

……………….autobiography and critical analysis.

……………….I have lost time and I want it back.

Elizabeth Powell’s title poem, “Atomizer,” begins with the suddenness appropriate to the image of an atomizer, launching into the air of the book the particles of a life that will sift love, betrayal, childhood, abandonment, birth, abortion, cows…. “Atomizer” mingles and weighs—Powell claiming objectivity and subjectivity in the same space as she finds Baudelairean correspondences through sensory impressions and poetics. Here is the confusion of perfumes, their layered duplicities, the tactical sense-making we pursue when the senses confound and produce metaphorical representations. From the first poem in Atomizer, I am off to the races with Elizabeth Powell.

Beyond Atomizer’s engaging speaker, it is difficult to find a likeable adult in these poems, “The grown-ups fading / into the afternoon’s vanishing line” again and again—propelling the speaker into an early search for safety and finding it most compellingly upstate at a grandmother’s farm,

         Small sassy child in coveralls and red bandana, I let

         the cows sub in for God, minister to me,

         for they have four mighty stomachs

         and chew Holy cud. I ask them if

         I will marry, and they moo.

Here, in “When the Insemination Man Comes to the Farm,” there is safety, but also the breach birth of a calf, the machinery of insemination—over and over the weighing of juxtapositions, roving between close narration and distant perspective taking, “I’ve spent a lifetime not saying what I mean / in order to say what I mean: the art of womanhood in my time, / but I’ve tried to make it sound serious and smart, / and so I’ve become a conspiracy theory to myself.”

Atomizer reads on one level as a memoir in poems, and on another level as a treatise. Lyrical, surprising, full of unpredictable turns, these poems anchor and upend. It’s a heady mix. I find Powell’s poems endlessly exciting and momentous. These poems make me want to understand my own life better—to be more adventurous in what to put on opposing sides of the logic scale of sense-making. Here, though, is Powell: a stunning thinker who threads connections between theory and spirituality, in love with place and people, in a constant shuffle of senses, making sense. It is precisely the intimacy of Atomizer, in tandem with its high intellect, that makes this book a tour de force.

The conceit of the book, an inherited atomizer and the world of olfaction and perfume, conjures scent images that drive these poems into narratives of subterfuge, the misunderstanding and understanding of others, as well as the self. “Ars Poetica” begins, “My first real speech rose scented / off of a cake of soap”—a child whose mother wants her to “say it nicely. I couldn’t.” In Atomizer, even “the mellifluous / obscenities I spoke, the words my mother found / horrid, disrespectful, utterances I loved” were wrapped in scent—a child’s mouth washed out with soap. A mother who “just liked the scent / of lavender and submission, / hated the words fuck and suck and no.” There is no denying that these are difficult poems but also periodically funny, absurd and full of love.

The capacious “Killing Rabbits,” a three-page stunner, rampages through history and personal experience—tumbling together mythology, education, neuroscience, birth control, The Clash, Watership Down, modern dance, Peter Rabbit, coming of age as a woman, and more. Powell ranges far and wide but keeps the poem inexorable, pressing toward its difficult center. This is a poem that both feints and sways away from what’s awful at the same time it refuses to relent, all the time driving toward its core concern—the trauma of abortion.

Throughout Atomizer, Powell builds a web between childhood with adulthood, connecting the dots in “Escape”:

……………My mother and her mother in bed. No one

……………Said a word, I shut the door.

……………She pretended I didn’t see. She pretended

……………subtext-plus-shut-up was truth.

……………There were no angels in our house only demons,

……………and ripped wallpaper stained with cat pee.

……………Whatever I saw, she said she didn’t see.

……………Later, my lovers would gaslight me,

This quest to unlock and understand the adult self takes the speaker to Vilnius to trace her family history. Using anaphora and nearly frenetic observations to build sense of her family’s past, Powell perseverates on an unknowable it until it is knowable:

……………It was delightful.

……………It was Sholem Aleichem.

……………It was magnificent like light blossoming

……………rose-flecked in June.

……………It smelled of barbed wire turning to sprigs of wild mint.

……………The temple smelled of myrrh and balsam and silence.

……………When I spoke to my life in the Old City

……………the song sang: It said it is,

……………it was, it will be. When I talked to my life,

……………when I talked to my life, I became my life

……………and the more I became my life

……………the more I talked to my life,

……………and my life sang the old Partisan Song

……………so that I might really live:

……………Therefore never say the road now ends

……………for you, though leaden skies may cover over days

……………blue. Our step beats out the message:

……………We are here.

Atomizer does brilliant work investigating coming of age and interrogating selfhood and society, but it is the stone the book turns over about men and predation that ends up at the center of this collection. Investigating the nature of deceit and the wish for an honest broker in “Lying Perfume Bottle of Chanel Pour Monsieur,” Powell writes:

……………How oakmossy the world is,

……………how odor is identity’s first ardor.

……………His scent opens, a portal. He said I seemed

……………worthy of its lemony neroli blessings,

……………its Coco philosophy of my life

……………didn’t please me so I created my life.

In searching for love in a mediated world of online profiles, we find: a chemical engineer who “managed the air / above waste dumps,” “the handsome pope of baseball,” Holofernes, the lover whose gift is an exercise bike, even Jesus, who “loves me, but he also loves other women.” Central to this collection is the quest for love, but also a sense of self free from the opinions and requirements of men. “I must stop making men my gods,” Powell declares.

In “Driving Home,” we get a glimpse of the fire behind the poems:

……………Despite all this,

……………My mind’s a phone ringing

……………off the hook, a black phone cut

……………off from the root

……………of a Plath poem. Sometimes it rings so loudly

……………it sounds like silence because I’m used to it—

……………it sounds like:

……………So what.

………………..

……………I can write because my index finger is so

……………and my pen is what

Powell is at her best in this, her third collection, balancing intellect and emotion, sincerity and wit, using olfactory imagery and heightened lyricism to develop her themes. As a poet who also revels in the collisions of association, I marvel at the breadth of her encyclopedic imagination and how deftly she weaves what she knows into the lyric space of these poems. Atomizer flies through its emotional, historical, cultural, and gendered landscapes, but never loses its keen focus and is not afraid of what looks like humor, but is so much darker, staring directly into the face of toxic masculinity. “Once I loved you madly like a girl pirate,” she writes in “Fumigation,” “Now I use my sword to pick up moldy, low-loft towels from the floor.”

Kerrin McCadden’s most recent book, American Wake (Black Sparrow Press), is currently a finalist for the New England Book Award in Poetry. She is associate poetry editor at Persea Books and associate director of The Conference on Poetry and Teaching at The Frost Place. She teaches at The Center for Technology, Essex and lives in South Burlington, Vermont.

10 August 2021