Knife on Snow
- Publisher
- Turnstone Press
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2023
- Category
- Women Authors, Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780888017680
- Publish Date
- Apr 2023
- List Price
- $18
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780888017697
- Publish Date
- Apr 2023
- List Price
- $14.95
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Description
What portents must you divine when a knife falls from the sky into your snow covered yard? With Knife on Snow, Alice Major employs history, myth, and science to understand a world ablaze.
From the bitumen hills of Fort McMurray to the barren reaches of Iceland, Knife on Snow depicts an earth bathed in dragon’s breath, where like the Norse gods bound to their fate, we stand transfixed by the consequences of our actions, both driver /and passenger— part-cause / part-witness of earth’s unwinding.
As you would expect in Alice Major’s expert hands this unwinding yields to an evolution, a discovery, an acceptance of struggles' end and the possibility of a tomorrow unknown.
About the author
Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter. She served as the City of Edmonton’s first poet laureate from 2005–2007. Among her previous books are Memory's Daughter, for which she won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award in 2011; The Occupied World; and The Office Tower Tales, for which she won the Pat Lowther Award in 2009. In 2010, she received a lifetime achievement award, presented by the City of Edmonton and the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton.
Excerpt: Knife on Snow (by (author) Alice Major)
From Knife on Snow:
Wicked wedge, its shape embossed
on the untracked snow of my city yard.
Blade crusted with frost.
The sky is, as always, dark
at this early winter evening hour. There are
streetlights in the alley—glum sodium
burns like the light of dying stars.
What arc of history
brings this here, so deep inside my property
surrounded by a wall of caragana
fifteen feet high. Dropped impossibly
like a god’s random hammer
—a silent, unnerving thunderbolt.
Its anonymous menace.
The lack of explanation for its cold
and alien metal presence.
Irrational. Yet surely it called
for agency, intention, to fling the blade
this far. My hedges grow thick
and tangled.
There must be rage
beyond my narrow bailiwick,
my guarded fiefdom in the snow.
This took one hell of a throw.
Other titles by
Reimagining Fire
The Future Of Energy
Locations of Grief
An Emotional Geography
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Standard candles
The Jade Spindle
The Office Tower Tales
Intersecting Sets
A Poet Looks at Science
Memory's Daughter
The Occupied World
Writing the Terrain
Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets
