On the Desire to Levitate is the first collection of poems by Alison Powell. This striking collection includes vivid, unflinching meditations on aging, mythology, poetry, and family.

On the Desire to Levitate is the first collection of poems by Alison Powell. This striking collection includes vivid, unflinching meditations on aging, mythology, poetry, and family. In tight, elegant lines that alternate between homage and elegy, these poems explore known subjects with a rebellious eye: a defeated Hercules and a bitter Eurydice, a sympathetic Lucifer, and generations of adolescent girls as mythical adventurers moving within a beloved but confining Midwest. Yet in Powell’s skillful hands, hardship never overtakes: as judge Charles Hood writes, “There’s often a delicious humor in this work, and always a deep and lasting integrity.”

"“The great strengths…of the book, are vividness, striking images, a sense of place, and a forthright approach to the normal ambivalence in families' experience of age and death.”" - Eclectica

"“In the second line of the title poem, which opens Alison Powell’s first col- lection, we encounter the word flight, italicized, set off by itself between a colon and a period as if framed for our notice. It is a useful clue, for the twenty-nine poems gathered here exhibit several kinds of flight.”" - Middle West Review