Elizabeth Powell’s latest collection defies category. It is at once wild and somber, lyric and narrative, performative and restrained. The collection moves without pronouncement from lyric essay to rhymed couplet, enacting, at times, a theatrical production, at other moments a meditative interior monologue. It is a collection that positions the reader as a spectator to the chorus of voices that move quickly, dizzily, through the poems.

The first poem in the collection, “Autocorrecting the Lyric I,” lays the groundwork for the resistance to category that will in part define this collection, and also reads as a kind of mini-summary for the life that will be traced from poem to poem. From stanza/paragraph three:

When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased
myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly,
disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater,
drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a
WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be
called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become
kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always
trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is
a Jew? A Gentile?

This poem is lyric as much as it is prose. It establishes the instability of the speaker we come to know in the collection, one who pushes us immediately onto unsure footing (a lyric essay to start a poetry collection), which mirrors the psyche of a young person coming to terms with her identity, her family history, herself. “I was so / stupid, I still did not know my phone number,” the speaker writes later in the essay, and later still, “the paradox of making a mockery of your self, to become not a / mockery of yourself.” The play between form and content in this poem and throughout the collection is a source of delight as we are invited to speculate alongside the speaker how genre, like dueling identities, can be a source of entrapment and a source of creativity.

The last poem in the collection, the title poem, reads in an entirely different register than “Autocorrecting.” There is the formal move from lyric prose to rhymed couplets, but the speaker too seems different, more somber and confident, older perhaps, having journeyed through the course of the poems. The tone is one of more acceptance for the reality of the relationship between father and daughter, one that is never going to change. And more acceptance too for the self, for the choosing-not-choosing who one might be in any given moment, or how a poem might look on the page.

O, Willy Loman, I’m your reckless daughter, your memento mori.
I’ll never be a character in your authorized story,

the one that brought you fame.
No, no one knows my name,

a character in search of a moment
to come alive. I am your love accident.

I sneak into narratives,
as some do movies.

…………………

I tread this stage to keep walking directly into my fate –
a character meeting herself on a blind date,

that stage-left tempest: I am the lost daughter,
and now you are the lost father.

…………………

Sometimes I’m ashamed, sometimes righteous. It’s a dramatic art.
I raise my fist until anyone can see it’s a heart.

I have a feeling that’s what drama is:
The line no one wants to write or live.

Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter is clearly in dialogue with Death of a Salesman, but that fact feels secondary to the exploration of a particular family dynamic. These poems seem more urgently an elegy for a dead father and a yearning to understand the self, and they read as a kind of spiritual journey overlaid with dramatic flair and theatrical production. As Powell writes, “theater, like fire, can fuse anything. The tug of war with what you are and what you pretend to be” (“Psychoanalysis of Fire: Torching the Fourth Wall”). The leaning on Death of a Salesman does feel a bit like fire in the collection, a torch that gets lit just as the speaker starts to dig into the self. It seems simple and reductive to assume Death of a Salesman, or the dramatic in general, might merely work as an out for a vulnerable speaker. In fact, on closer reading, it seems as though the tug of war happening in the poems between the public and private fits into the female-as-viewer conundrum referenced in the epigraph: “the problem for the female-as-viewer, the female spectator, is how can she ‘look’ when the economy of the gaze is male?”

The speaker in Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter grapples repeatedly with this problem of identity, the paradox of being “the GIRL CHILD in the play, but have been written out of the play” (“Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances”). Even the title points to the inherent problem in the collection; that is, this is not just one woman’s exploration of her life or a quest to understand merely her family dynamic, but to consider the female self in relation to the father in a world dominated by patriarchal rule.

What gives this collection weight, what makes it worth reading beyond the virtuoso of craft that it so obviously announces itself to be, is that it grapples with the complications of being a daughter. How can one come to know herself if she primarily identifies in relationship first, if she calls herself Willy Loman’s reckless daughter in place of a name? And do any of us ever really move beyond the shadow of our parents, that first and most defining relationship with the other? Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter is a stunning collection, wild, ambitious, brave. But more than that, it asked this reader to become part of the drama, to figure out her place on a stage that often has no part written for her.