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Poetry Canadian

Welcome to the Anthropocene

by (author) Alice Major

Publisher
The University of Alberta Press
Initial publish date
Mar 2018
Category
Canadian, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Women Authors
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781772123975
    Publish Date
    Mar 2018
    List Price
    $15.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781772123685
    Publish Date
    Jan 2018
    List Price
    $21.99

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Description

Alice Major observes the comedy and the tragedy of this human-dominated moment on Earth. Major’s most persistent question—“Where do we fit in the universe?”—is made more urgent by the ecological calamity of human-driven climate change. Her poetry leads us to question human hierarchies, loyalties, and consciousness, and challenges us to find some humility in our overblown sense of our cosmic significance.

Now, welcome to the Anthropocene you battered, tilting globe. Still you gleam, a blue pearl on the necklace of the planets.

This home. Clouds, oceans, life forms span it from pole to pole, within a peel of air as thin as lace lapped round an apple. Fair and fragile bounded sphere, yet strangely tough— this world that life could never love enough. And yet its loving-care has been entrusted to a feckless species, more invested in the partial, while the total goes unnoticed.

— from “Welcome to the Anthropocene”

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.

Alice Major's profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, Raymond Souster Award / League of Canadian Poets
  • Short-listed, Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry | Alberta Book Publishing Awards, Book Publishers Association of Alberta
  • Short-listed, Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize

Editorial Reviews

"...(the book’s title [Welcome to the Anthropocene] is a reference to the current geologic age, the one in which human activity is the dominant influence on the Earth’s physical environment). [Alice Major’s] work, art that reckons with science, is part of a long tradition."

The Atlantic

# 8 on Edmonton's Bestselling Books list; Poetry, December 01, 2019

# 8 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, February 14, 2021

"This wide-ranging and beautiful collection combines scientific knowledge of evolution, DNA, and mathematical formulas with a caring attention to the wondrous connections between human and non-human life." Canadian Literature, October 5, 2018 [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/environmental-metamorphoses]

Kait Pinder

"Because the universe is big and all but incomprehensible, the average Jills and Joes don’t dare ask too many existential questions. It is left to poets to face the truth in those places the rest of us fear to tread. The author of eleven books of poetry and essays, Edmonton’s first poet laureate, and a woman comfortable in the realms of math, science, and cosmology, Alice Major is uniquely qualified to guide humanity through perilous ecological times. Thank you, Alice."

Foreword Magazine

"Welcome to the Anthropocene is a real achievement.... [These] poems are intelligent, philosophically and ethically searching, formally engaging, and dappled with precise information and detail..."

Edward A. Dougherty

"Welcome to the Anthropocene is a poet’s take on the climate crisis, which blends math and science with poetry to produce a beautiful and wondrous examination of the natural world and humanity’s devastating impact on it. While such an undertaking could easily be defeatist, Major’s collection retains a sense of hope and genuine love for humanity that makes her poetry a refreshing read in an era plagued by eco-anxiety and negative climate news."

Katherine DeCoste

“Poets work like naturalists or scientists. What they do is based on what has gone before. Alexander Pope wrote Essay on Man, one of the most quoted poems in the English language, in the 18th century… This collection is written in Alberta, in the 21st century. Its title poem, “Welcome to the Anthropocene”, has the same metre and rhyme scheme, and uses Pope’s poem as a platform for a survey of the world the poet sees.… There are a number of other fine poems, of varying lengths, touching a lot of subjects, with influences that seem to range from Gerard Manley Hopkins to a Peterson Field Guide.… The poems are serious, but the reader can expect to have fun reading them.” [Full review at http://canadianfieldnaturalist.ca/index.php/cfn/article/view/2087/1968]

The Canadian Field-Naturalist, vol. 131, no.4

#5 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, April 30, 2023

# 7 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, June 19, 2022

"[A] confrontational yet compassionate collection of 57 poems that cut through the fluff of everyday life.... It takes courage to criticize this human-dominated planet, and compassion to remain accepting of humanity despite our collective faults. In place of answers to the questions that drive Major's poetry, she offers insight—and the insights she uncovers make Welcome to the Anthropocene deeply engaging, and wholly human."

Freefall Magazine

"Alice Major is that rarest of beings, a poet whose imagination is fired by science and mathematics.... [W]ith her broad range of sympathies and wide-ranging curiosity we have a sense of inclusiveness rare in contemporary poetry (which often prefers to live in a world of its own), and a comprehensive vision not afraid of dealing with public issues.... This is poetry with a brain as well as a heart--it not only makes us feel but also succeeds in making us think." [Full review at http://londongrip.co.uk/2018/08/london-grip-poetry-review-alice-major/]

London Grip Poetry Review

"In Welcome to the Anthropocene, Major is not offering a guide to action so much as a guide to broadening the problem beyond the sometimes pat suggestions of political and environmental activists.... What Major adds here is the duality of the Anthropocene: our despair in the face of it and the fact that whether we avoid, protest, reform, or embrace this new world, we are still in it." [Full review at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/great-chain-alice-majors-welcome-anthropocene/#!]

LA Review of Books

"Welcome to the Anthropocene is a virtuosic, challenging book of poetry by Alice Major. This collection is by turns a lament, a dirge and a celebration of being on earth in this human-dominated moment.... It is a compelling book of tightly wrought, deeply skilled verse that contains within it the seeds of hope.... Major's ecologically minded poems demonstrate anew why poetry and art play leading roles in helping us to conceive of better times that are yet to come."

Alberta Views

“Welcome to the Anthropocene is airy but tight … Major [is] someone who is unimpressed by the conforming type of self-satisfied nonconformist but who values the truly different, those who take an oblique angle on things.”

University of Toronto Quarterly, Summer 2020

"...Alice Major writes an ambitious work that addresses many of the issues besetting our times...[T]he collection is an intelligent work that presents and argues and wins us over in stunning metaphors and catchy measures reinforced by couplets..." [Full review at https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/24]

The Goose

"There are poems about the workaday world, a poem written in the voice of a mouse, a poem about missing the Muse's house call because the poet—damn hygiene!—was in the shower."

Bruce Whiteman

"Each section contains smaller poems on a wide variety of topics––like local ecology, office life, mathematics, community, the domestic sphere, time, cognitive illusions, and more. Though varied in subject, so many of these poems bring us back to the problem of being human; that is, we place ourselves at the centre and see the world around us through a distorted lens."

Jenny Haysom

# 10 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 18, 2018

"Major is a keen observer of the river and natural environment around her hometown of Edmonton and the way it is changing as a result of climate disruption. She has the dual ability to engage us in this particular locale as well as transport us to a universal place where we can examine the bigger questions of our time..." [Full article at https://artistsandclimatechange.com/2020/02/25/welcome-to-the-anthropocene/]

Artists and Climate Change

"Alice Major begins "Welcome to the Anthropocene" by considering all the ways humans have meddled with the environment... The traditional and experimental forms which appear throughout the book reinforce Major's argument...and hint at unseen evolutionary forces at work; rhyming couplets which make up the first poem call to mind the 'base pairs' of DNA, even as they echo Pope's 'An Essay on Man.'... She excels at depicting situations when humans are themselves little more than kind animals, unusually intelligent but never quite intelligent enough, and often confounded by their own place in the ecosphere.

Maisonneuve, Winter 2017

# 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 11, 2018

Other titles by

Reimagining Fire

The Future Of Energy

by (author) Eveline Kolijn, Alice Major, Larry Kapustka, Kim Mannix, Monica Kidd, Emma Gammans, Rosemary Griebel, Maggie Hanna, Richard Harrison, Barb Howard, Mark Hopkins, Shannon Kernaghan, Alexis Kienlen, Michael Leeb, Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon, Natalie Meisner, Mar’ce Merrell, Peter Midgley, Uchechukwu Umezurike & Donna Williams
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Locations of Grief

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by (author) Jenna Butler & Catherine Graham

Standard candles

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The Jade Spindle

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The Office Tower Tales

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Intersecting Sets

A Poet Looks at Science

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Memory's Daughter

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The Occupied World

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Writing the Terrain

Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets

contributions by Ian Adam, Robert Stamp, Tammy Armstrong, Margaret Avison, Douglas Barbour, John O. Barton, Doug Beardsley, Bonnie Bishop, E.D. Blodgett, Robert Boates, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Jan Boydol, Gordon Burles, Murdoch Burnett, Anne Campbell, Weyman Chan, Leonard Cohen, Dennis Cooley, Joan Crate, Michael Cullen, Cyril Dabydeen, Lorne Daniel, Alexa DeWiel, Jason Dewinetz, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Cecelia Frey, Gary Geddes, Gail Ghai, Deborah Godin, Jim Green, Leslie Greentree, Vivian Hansen, Tom Henihan, Michael Henry, Walter Hildebrandt, Gerald Hill, Robert Hilles, Nancy Holmes, Richard Hornsey, Tom Howe, Aislinn Hunter, Bruce Hunter, Laurence Hutchman, Sally Ito, Pauline Johnson, Aleksei Kazuk, Robert Kroetsch, Fiona Lam, William Latta, Tim Lilburn, Alice Major, Kim Maltman, Miriam Mandel, Sid Marty, David McFadden, Barry McKinnon, Erin Michie, Deborah Miller, Anna Mioduchowska, James M. Moir, Colin Morton, Erín Moure, Charles Noble, P.K. Page, Rajinderpal Pal, Ruth Roach Pierson, Joseph Pivato, Roberta Rees, D.C. Reid, Monty Reid, R. rickey, Ken Rivard, Stephen Scobie, Allan Serafino, Joan Shillington, Greg Simison, Carol Ann Sokoloff, Karen Solie, Stephan Stephansson, Peter Stevens, Ivan Sundal, Anne Swannell, Vanna Tessier, Colleen Thibadeau, John O. Thompson, James M. Thurgood, Eva Tihanyi, Yvonne Trainer, Aritha van Herk, Rosalee van Stelten, Miriam Waddington, James Wreford Watson, Wilfred Watson, Tom Wayman, Phyllis Webb, Jon Whyte, Christine Wiesenthal, Sheri-D Wilson, Christopher Wiseman, Stacie Wolfer, Rita Wong, Richard Woollatt & Jan Zwicky