This is a daughter's poetic homage to her parents, both elegy and celebration, that explores the transformations wrought by history, biology, and the alchemy of love. In Greek myth, the daughters of Memory were the Muses. Alice Major listens carefully to their voices. ".tender, wise, beautifully cadenced work which embraces the reader on every page." - Don Domanski

Memory's Daughter (cuRRents)

Literature & Fiction

Major, Alice

Poetry

University of Alberta Press

Poet Alice Major was given a book on relativity at the impressionable age of ten, so she never quite understood why science came to be dismissed as reductive or opposite to art. She surveys the sciences of the past half-century -- from physical to cognitive to evolutionary -- to shed light on why and how human beings create poems, challenging some of the mantras of postmodern thought in the process. Part memoir, part ars poetica, part wonder-journey, Intersecting Sets is a wide-ranging and insightful amalgam.

Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Corona radiata (St. Thomas poetry series)

St. Thomas Poetry Series

Scenes from the Sugar Bowl Caf

Broken Jaw Pr

There is a beginning and a middle. There is an arc of narrative. There is a word, a large engraved initial. There is imperative- a cause, a god. Or not. -from "Let us compare cosmologies"
Like the ever-widening universe, Standard Candles expands on Alice Major's earlier themes of family, mythology, and cosmology, teasing out subtle wonders in form and subject. Her voice resonates through experiments with old and new poetic forms as she imbues observed and imagined phenomena-from the centres of galaxies to her own backyard-with the most grounded and grounding moments of human experience, masterfully linking cosmology with the human heart. Readers of poetry and other speculative literatures in search of an emotional dimension that seamlessly intersects with the four dimensions of space and time will surely find it here.

Standard candles (Robert Kroetsch Series)

It isn't easy to throw things in the sea for the sea will bring them back again -from "In memoriam"Alice Major continues her long engagement with science and math as means for finding significance in human life and in the universe. In these poems, she 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, and challenges us to find some humility in our overblown sense of our cosmic significance. These poems question human hierarchies, loyalties, and consciousness, and invite readers to join the conversation.  RobertKroetschSeries

Welcome to the Anthropocene (Robert Kroetsch Series)

The University of Alberta Press

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Books by Major, Alice