112 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / Love & Erotica | Poetry / Women Authors | Social Studies / Gender Studies
In Atomizer, Elizabeth A. I. Powell examines pressing questions of today, from equality and political unrest to the diminishing of democratic ideals, asking if it is even appropriate to write about love in a time seemingly hurtling toward authoritarianism. With honesty and humor, her poems explore fragrance and perfumery as a means of biological and religious seduction. Evoking Whitman’s sentiment that we are all made of the same atoms, Atomizer looks toward an underestimated sense—scent—as a way to decipher the liminal spaces around us. Molecules of perfume create an invisible reality where narratives can unfold and interact, pathways through which Powell addresses issues of materialism, body image, and the physical and psychological contours of emotional relationships.
A work of fearless social satire and humorous yet painful truth, Atomizer offers a cultural, political, and sociological account of love in the present moment.
Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter, named one of the “Books We Loved in 2016” by the New Yorker. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and literary journals such as Barrow Street, Electric Literature, the Missouri Review, and Ploughshares. She is professor of writing and literature at Northern Vermont University–Johnson and editor of Green Mountains Review.
“Elizabeth A. I. Powell is one of those rare poets of tremendous spiritual obsessions who are at the same time in complete command of the organic world—its tactility, physicality, violence, and strange, unsettling details. She is visionary yet concrete. She is always startling and dramatic. Her poems are big and engulfing, yet shot through with a beautiful locality and precision. She sees the sermons in the stones.”—Vijay Seshadri, author of 3 Sections, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
“Atomizer presents a world reflected through our most elusive sense: olfaction. Generously evocative, reflective, and above all human, the poems in this book present themselves as little aromatic jewels. They capture what it means to be a sensory body with a brain attached. They get to the feeling of a sense that is impossible to know.”—Saskia Wilson-Brown, founder and executive director of the Institute for Art and Olfaction
“Atomizer spritzes, spits, and deluges us in the perfumery of seduction, fetish, duplicity, commodity, and code. What carries the day is the speaker herself, a fierce, traumatized truth-teller whose X-ray eyes see through it all in a work of harrowing brilliance and sheer heartbreak. I urge you to douse yourself in Atomizer.”—Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl
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