Inheritance
Seals
Silver Devils
Fallowfield Station
Whiskey Mantra
Lifeboat
Ghost Lake
Muskrat
The Encounter
At Piraeus
Song for a Sleeping Father
Rain Dance
Negative Theology
Saint Sebastian Ooh-La-La
Big Spender
Respite
The Rich
To My Creditors
Family Jewel
Curse of the Magdalene
Rubric
Skinnydipping
The Girls Who Work at the Makeup Counter
Appearances
Jig
The Well
Mirror Lake
Two Views of a Stag
Perdita
Tantum Ergo
Get with Child a Mandrake Root
Bernadette
The Emporer
Fandango
Song for a Smoke-Filled Room
Malefic
Inhuman
The Other Grandmother
Russian Brides
Hensol
The Wreckage
Florilegia

"Powerful ... full of dark nostalgia."-Nathan Englander

The Lifeboat

All night in his lifeboat my father sang
to keep the voices of the other men
who cried in the wreckage from reaching him,

he sang what he knew of the requiem,
of the hit parade and the bits of hymns,
he sang until he would never sing again,

scalding his raw throat with sea-water
until his ribs heaved, until the salt
wept from his eyes on dry land,

flecked at his lips in his squalling rages,
streaked the sheets in his night sweats
as night after night the reassembled ship

scattered its parts on the shore of his bed,
and the lifeboat eased him out again
to drown each night among singing men.

Inspired by a shipwreck endured by her father during the Second World War, and by his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and eventual suicide, Inheritance is a powerful poetic debut by the winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest and The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.

Born in Montreal, Kerry-Lee Powell has lived in Australia, Antigua, and The United Kingdom, where she studied Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cardiff University and directed a literature promotion agency. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies throughout the United Kingdom and North America, including The Spectator, The Boston Review, and The Virago Writing Women series. In 2013, she won The Boston Review fiction contest, The Malahat Review's Far Horizons Award for short fiction, and the Alfred G. Bailey manuscript prize. A chapbook entitled "The Wreckage? has recently been published in England by Grey Suit Editions. A novel and short fiction collection are forthcoming from HarperCollins. Inheritance is her first book.