Publications
Alice Major has published 12 collections of poetry and a collection of essays on poetry and science. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and her poems have be published in a number of publications around the world. Alice's work has received multiple awards, most recently an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta.
Knife on Snow
In this collection of poetry, Alice Major lays out issues facing us all today—the climate crisis, our human tendency to default to anger and conflict, our location in a larger solar system (which we look at through our all-too-human lenses). The book continues Alice's long interest in science, but also the connections forged by history and the narratives of mythology. These are clear-eyed observations of the human condition at a difficult, complex time. However, the book doesn’t predict apocalypse, even if people often tend to. Discover Knife on Snow.
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Welcome to the Anthropocene continues Alice's engagement with science and mathematics, which (like poetry) are ways we try to find meaning in the universe. The Anthropocene is a term that has been picking up velocity in scientific circles over recent decades, as we try to come to terms with how (and how much) human activity is shaping the planet. It draws on biology, evolutionary science, current events, and ultimately cosmology to ask the down-to-earth question: where do humans belong “… in a wholeness where / everything is common and everything is rare?” Explore Welcome to the Anthropocene.
Standard Candles
A standard candle is used to calculate distances. Standard Candles is a poetry collection that juxtaposes distances here on earth (the distances society creates, distances from loved ones) with the increasingly vast distances calculated for the universe. Some poems are personal and deeply moving. Many of them are playful. Suppose, for instance, there isn’t a single, god-like Theory-of-Everything equation on which the universe is founded, but instead a whole pantheon of mini-gods for the math governing everything from prime numbers to teapots? Suppose, in the jumble of cosmological models that scientists come up with, there is one for every temperament: what model would suit an undertaker? A survivalist? Find out more about Standard Candles.
Intersecting Sets: a poet looks at science
Interesting things happen at the edges, which is why Alice allows two sets—the work of poets and the work of scientists—to intersect in this book of essays. We are living in one of the most exciting ages of science, shifting from the mechanistic universe that made science seem so cold a century ago to a world shaped by unfolding complexity and fractal wiggles. The probing of brains and the sifting of DNA are helping humans truly understand how we are related to the natural world in which we evolved. As a poet, Alice practices an art that humans have been sharing since the dawn of language, from the campfires of the OMO people to today’s rappers. All this time, poetry has been used to understand and respond to the world’s patterns and to explore our central questions—who are we? How did all this begin? What is change? What is time? (And what time is it, anyway?). Discover Alice's book of essays Intersecting Sets.
Memory's Daughter
Alice's parents died within six weeks of each other in 2007. She had been looking after them for several years, through her father’s Alzheimer and her mother’s cancer, but their deaths were sudden, breath-takingly sudden. During the quiet winter that followed, Alice was reading Richard Dawkins’ book, The Ancestors Tale. She writes: "Once again, the incredible connectedness of the deep past washed over me, all the tiny, tiny steps that created the variety of life on this planet. I found myself writing the linked sonnets of "Time is how". The final set of poems in Memory's Daughter about my parents’ marriage takes its titles from the processes that alchemists used to try and create the philosophers’ stone, that marvelous transformative goal that was never quite achieved. Yet the effort led to so much. The muses were the daughters of memory. Grief makes memory overwhelming, even the smallest recollection is so sharp a shard. Yet it is through those memories we recover." Discover Memory's Daughter.
The Office Tower Tales
The Office Tower Tales takes its starting point from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but moves the story-telling six centuries forward and several thousand miles to the northwest. Readers meet receptionist Aphrodite, Pandora from accounting and Sheherazad, the girl from public relations. They gather to share coffee breaks and lunch hours in Commerce Place. During a nine-month period that builds toward the year 2000 and the birth of Pandora’s first (and illegitimate) granddaughter, Sheherazad tells her friends seventeen tales that halt the hectic march of time and speak to their concerns about growing old, working, loving, and living in an urban world. The Office Tower Tales received the Pat Lowther Award (best book of poetry by a Canadian woman, from the League of Canadian Poets) and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta award for “Trade Book of the Year (Fiction).” It was also shortlisted for the City of Edmonton Book Prize. Explore The office Tower Tales.
The Occupied World
In ancient Roman times rituals were performed to sanctify the ground on which new cities were founded. With this invocation, space could then be occupied. The poems in Occupied World concern human occupation: how we occupy cities; how we occupy ourselves as citizens, workers and thinkers; how we occupy mythologies and metaphors; and how we occupy the passage of our lives. Written largely in a public voice, these poems invoke human preoccupations that resonate through landscapes of time and space. The sequence, "Contemplating the City", which opens the book was the winner of the Malahat Review’s long poem contest. It takes the ancient Roman rituals of founding a town as the template for contemplating a new prairie city. Explore The Occupied World.
Some Bones and a Story
Some Bones and a Story is Alice's sixth book of poetry, in which she looks at the lives of some of her favourite female saints. The poet's point of view is decidedly contemporary while at the same time Alice manages to give these poems a medieval flavour through her use of language and imagery. The collection is a series of dramatic monologues in the voices of different female saints, from Saint Anne (Mother of the Virgin Mary) to Saint Scholastica (twin sister of St. Benedict). This collection was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award (given annually for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman). Dig into Some Bones and a Story.
Corona Radiata
Corona Radiata is a meditation how an embryo becomes a human being. The title comes from the web of cells that arrange themselves around the egg cell after it is released from the ovary. The book’s nine sections describe a series of journeys within journeys. Voyages to map a new world. Travels through time. Searches in the maze. Pilgrimages to a known destination. Random wanderings. The great migration of species repeated by the individual. Corona Radiata is a small, beautifully made book with a woodcut designed by Nancy Ruth Jackson for its front cover. In its small dimensions, it embraces a large world. Explore the journey within Corona Radiata.
Tales For an Urban Sky
This is a wry, witty look at how humans create mythologies. The title series of poems creates a year-long cycle of urban moons, named for objects in the city environment — just as any hunting and gathering culture has named the moons of the year for objects important to it.
The collection also includes the sequence, Scenes from the Sugar Bowl Cafe, which won the Canadian Poetry Association’s Shaunt Basmajian chapbook contest. The manuscript won the Poets’ Corner Award, sponsored by Broken Jaw Press, in 1999. It was also a finalist for the City of Edmonton Book Prize and for the Alberta Writers Guild’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Look at Tales For an Urban Sky.
Lattice of the Years
This is a book of love poems—not only an Epithalamion for a middle-aged marriage, but also love poems to families scattered around the globe and beyond. It records the experience of emigration from Scotland and the symmetry transformations that leave love altered and yet the same. Lattice of the Years was shortlisted for the City of Edmonton Book Prize. Enter the stories and journeys in Lattice of the Years.
Time Travels Light
This is Alice's first collection of poetry, published by Rowan Books as one of the first titles under The Books Collective—an innovative attempt in the early 1990s to provide a way for a group of small presses in Edmonton, Alberta with shared resources in areas such as marketing and distributing books. The cover of Time Travels Light is illustrated with “Big Bang Tennis” by Colleen Philippi. The collection’s five sections set out main themes that Alice has developed as a poet ever since: science as a source of metaphor, the human relationships of family, and a wry sense of humour. Explore Time Travels Light.
The Jade Spindle
The Jade Spindle is Alice's second YA fantasy novel. It's a tale of another world – a string world, lying right beside our own, settled many years ago by people of the great Huang-ti, the mythical Yellow Emperor of China. A group of teenagers accidentally find their way to this world where the sun never rises or sets. While they are stranded here, they experience journeys and battles, dilemmas and discoveries, magic and ancient traditions. Explore the world of The Jade Spindle.
The Chinese Mirror
The Chinese Mirror was Alice’s first published book. It is a fantasy for young readers, in the traditions of Narnia and Wonderland. The Chinese Mirror won the Fourth Alberta Writing for Youth contest, and was a finalist for the Canadian Library Associations Book of the Year for Young People. It was also selected as a recommended book by CBC’s Morningside book panel. Look into The Chinese Mirror.
