REVIEW BY NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

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What’s not in a scent? Fragrance? Perfume? Smells? Or the human condition itself? Elizabeth Powell’s brave new olfactory dispenser of poetry, Atomizer, suggests that what’s not in a scent is a knowledge we are not privy too, despite all our claims to ideation, reason, symbolization and transcendence. We are, instead, beings lashed to immanence, as in the ‘odor,’ as in knowing love is not just knowing the idea and word ‘love,’ but the thing—love— itself. You find out what Galbanum means and does. Through the senses.

It’s easy to fall instantly in addiction with the conceit of Powell’s poems when she writes,  “Indeed, our desire to smell pleasant things is from our lost garden” (4). How can a poet go wrong after such an invocation of Eden as the touchstone of all that is valued and always, forever, lost? Extending the lapsarian conceit, misogyny does smell of lily of the valley (4), or whatever tropical fruit of flower might be at hand depending on where the valley is. The associative quality of words that Powell’s  work relies on, of which syntactic and semantic reason know nothing, repeatedly beg this one question: how can a scent not be perfumed with desire? (19). Moreover, agonistically, the poetic qualities of conjuncture and disjuncture, dissociations, images harboring and hinting at sensibilities—“instamatic photos of oceans I was not invited to”—(19) make instant sense because, of course, all our girlhoods have  lighted knowing girls the way to dusty womanliness. Young bones litter the ocean floor. Reading these poems is like reading the retrospective journals of an old girlfriend, or prophetic letters from their future.

Powell’s poetry works on so many different levels—sensorial, intellectual, psychological, associative, dissociative, feminist, post-feminist, passional, intersubjective, intergenerational and trans-species—but the most intense effect it has is that of poetry in the best sense of unrhymed, unrestrained exclamations and ejaculations that form the ‘base notes’ (4) of ‘love.’ When the poems stop referencing olfaction repeatedly or exclusively as in the section Top Notes, they connect to the Atomizer prologue through the theme of rage (as frustrated love) at the Lesbian Mother emerging  powerfully, insistently, as in the poem titled “Escape”: “How can I make this be a feminist text?/ The oppressed Lesbian Mother should be the hero” (21). There is also ongoing iconoclasm beyond the rejection of the Lesbian Mother in rejecting old white men’s modes of entry into the world of the imagination and the fantastic, as in the reference to The Lion and the Wardrobe on p. 18.

But the ends are linked, the circle is rounded, with the exile from the Lesbian Mother’s household to that of the (presumably straight?) grandmother in whose farm lived “the old cow/Alice, on the urine-soaked hay that gave me a love/For ruinous colognes. For a pillow, Alice’s mighty belly/Where I’d listen to the wisdom of her sacred gurgles/During the milking hour at twilight, the time/Mother’s girlfriend called L’Heure Bleue” (21). And out of the abandonment by Lesbian Mothers that literally results in imprisonment via literal closeting of the young daughter at other times in an impossible urban space with younger siblings—a frightening, un-Edenic, small space—some of the most vivid and terrifying language about distillation, about being bottled like a captured scent, occurs only by fantasies of escape and return to the sheltering grandmother’s dairy farm:

“. . . .  I was here, out on good behavior

To this place my mother hated. Heifers jailed in a pen.

Later, she got another place in the city with her secret wife,

Left us sixty miles away in the old closet. I was in charge,

Used laundry quarters for candy bars for dinner.

She’d come back Tuesday/Thursday nights,

Take us for pizzaburgers. The silence was the gag rule,

For which there was no Heimlich.

She was just mother’s friend.

In an escape room you have to figure out

What in the room is a clue. In college, we talked

for days about Jane Eyre and attics. We played “Clue”

In a lounge with windows. I know how the need

To solve for X starts to influence how you perceive

Reality and the resulting adrenaline can be fabulous.

Why look for places to escape from? The room is not

A puzzle, it is a container for the puzzle. Back at the closet,

I was a glass bottle of distilled silence

In an ornate box made of Lavender Scare. My mother

And her girlfriend never abandoned their city apartment

Until they were carried out on long white stretchers

Where their bodies continued to hold that silence

Like a library. And after a long time, I saw free children

In the park playing with their two mothers, marching in freedom

Parades, and I cried. And the vacuumed silence in my head popped.

And one day a window in my heart opened, and I crawled out” (21-22).

Easily some of the richest, explosive, irradiated language about mis-parenting that can be imagined, this is also Powell’s haunting stare at the bomb-blasted ground of womanhood and motherhood as a noxious container, an atomizer, within patriarchy. That container gives off the stench of abuse stored in smaller containers like the ‘Matryoshka girl daemon’ (2) layered within it and called patriarchy, mother, closet, daughter, heifer, haystack, grass, and lastly the essential hidden and minute flower or herb in nature that, distilled and atomized, stands olfactory testament to the idea of ‘essence’ as often manipulated, boxed in, tactically and unscrupulously ‘dispensed,’ as perhaps in a certain narrative of feminist liberation long hailed as the best kind.

Being haunted by boxes and closets—little spaces—continues into “E.Diptych,” where men and potential ‘matches” live in “little” or “Magical” boxes (24), the box reference being, of course, to digital social interfaces like computer and phone screens, but also to the haunting states of isolation in apparent connectivity the ‘social’ interfaces are known to inspire: feelings of being ‘boxed in,’ ‘closeted,’ and ‘distilled’ to an unbearable yet unavoidable nostalgic memory of immediacy as ‘Olfaction’ (2), so phonetically akin to ‘old-fashioned’! The news out of televisions—boxes—sickens and haunts too: “The television is a liquor cabinet to which we will retreat/ after dinner. Change the channel, change your liquor:/ beer before liquor never sicker” (26). And the tyranny of ‘The TV’ is almost as bad as the tyranny of the Lesbian mother who just wants, needs, away, away, away (“The Box”). Indeed, “The Box” is dedicated to “The TV,” which appears forty-six times over 2 pages, not counting minor avatars, laying bare the enchantment with incantations that keeps society and children and women from not vanishing into the TV, the Box (and the boxes within the Box).

The images, conceits, cocktails and fusions uncontained in Powell’s Atomizer are elusive, nebulous and polymorphous—like scent, perfume, smell, odor, stench—but the overall assault of her language on the reader’s senses is to harness an arousal latent in a repressed cross-sensory spectrum revealing the world as ‘objectified’ and ‘commodified’ across a panorama and panoply of not one but many senses and sensoria, making ‘truth’ salvageable from not the triumphal achievement but the unstoppable “desire to smell pleasant things” which is “from our lost garden” (emphasis mine; 4). Though feminist and femino-centric, Powell’s poetry has transcended the boxing of words into political categories and schemas, opting instead for the explosive unmanageability, the smoky ‘perfume’ (‘second-hand smoke’ as in ‘per’ or ‘through’ and ‘fumus’ or ‘smoke’) of the human condition, and of poetry, whereby “We ingest each other through our nostrils” “86,400 times a day” (30).

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Nandini Bhattacharya is a Writer and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her fields of expertise are South Asia Studies, Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, Women’s Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published three scholarly books on these subjects, the latest being Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). Her first novel Love’s Gardenwas published in October 2020. Shorter work has been published or will be in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021, the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), Funny Pearls, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, The Bangalore Review, PANK,and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and VONA. Her awards include first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021. She’s currently working on a scholarly monograph about how colonialism and capitalism continue to shape India’s cultural production, and a second novel titled Homeland Blues, about love, caste, colorism, and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America. She lives outside Houston. You can find her on Amazon, Twitter; Instagram, Facebook and her Blog.