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  • Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances by Elizabeth A.I. Powell
  • Tanya Grae
Elizabeth A.I. Powell. Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances. Anhinga Press, 2016.

In Elizabeth A.I. Powell's second collection of poems, Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, the title speaker juxtaposes her life against a conceit, Arthur Miller's iconic play, Death of a Salesman, to interrogate the dark side of the American dream and the roles we play. Powell's work, reminiscent of Frank Bidart's dramatic monologues and Anne Carson's sequences, stares boldly into her grief.

Hyperawareness, the postmodern anxiety of our generation, opens the book center stage in the prose poem "Autocorrecting the Lyric I": "I keep autocorrecting myself…The paradox of making a mockery of yourself, to become not a mockery of yourself." This tightrope between reality and doubt, so much pretending, pleasing, morphs one (usually cast as a woman) into the full-blown identity crisis Powell so deftly enacts on the page. Autocorrection serves as a central intelligence or omniscience persistently suggesting a truth when answers are not forthcoming and remains a trope throughout the collection. The book's acute tension is the actual death of the father, while the chronic tension, building over decades, is his affective absence in the life of his daughter. Powell also examines the effects of intermarriage, marital breakdown, and parental influence.

Although the book begins in first-person, the speaker and point of view shift across the four sections. In the first, we receive just enough exposition to suspend disbelief as the daughter transposes both worlds, method acting through a Stanford Meisner exercise in "Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances" to build her character into being and voice. Powell experiments with form, including divination, an accident report, set design notes, and offstage narration, to reveal family dynamic and trauma.

In the second section, Powell offers a sonnet sequence, "The Understudy's Soliloquies," that opens at the funeral of her father, the patriarch, where all of his worlds have merged: wives, mistresses, children. The speaker is numb, observant, meditating on the aftershocks of his life— [End Page 52]

securely away. His success bred a quiet discontent    like the one percent's.It rotted into compost for the secret life he grew. I    tried to plantnew rows inside the long untended furrows. The    distance to hell's fjordin negative numbers. Whatever is rocky will have to    produce its own reward.

The family navigates the intrigues in the mourning days that follow, and the speaker maps the situation with more reserve, but also with empathy for her infant half-sister, who

wails like a discordant jazz (rising over the village    that I will replaygladly. Wherever she is she will never find him, he    always drives away,           […] Somehoweverything is a stage marker: The lingering scent of his aftershave.

The third section opens with "Regarding My Autopsy," a sequence wherein the father observes his postmortem, wanders, and implores his daughter to "conjure that which was once me // putting a soft blanket over you at midnight // I've left you nothing but narrative to appease your afflictions—" To which the next poem, "Condolence in Cement" responds with an imperative:

Make your partings complete.Don't roll them over and over

like a worry stone, until your hands are dry and cut,your mind wave-worn as a cliff hit by incoming tides.

Throughout the section, we are presented with the vestiges of a life: the autopsy, the burial, the will, condolences. Everything and everyone left behind. In the sequence "What Death Said," the father is present in his own name, Lewis Itkin, and not the character Willie Loman. Death speaks to Lewis as he passes over, guiding him through death and a life review scored with anaphora and the mystical cadence of rowing across Styx, "to take his body speck by blessed speck to the place where the living cannot go." Powell summons us back with "How to Sew an Unhemmed Day" and into the quotidian that isn't "At the Swatch Watch Store in Newark's Terminal C...

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