Search results for ""Author Alexandra Oliver""

A CANADIAN POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR, THE NATIONAL POST WINNER OF THE PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD "Alexandra Oliver has many arrows in her quiver--all of them sharpened to a fine point. This is an excellent and entertaining collection."--TIMOTHY STEELE In Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, Alexandra Oliver zooms in on the inertias, anxieties, comedies, cruelties, and epiphanies of domestic life: They all had names like Jennifer or Lynne or Katherine; they all had bone-blonde hair, that wet, flat cut with bangs. They pulled your chair from underneath you, shoved their small fists in your face. Too soon, you knew it would begin, those minkish teeth like shrapnel in the air, the Bacchic taunts, the Herculean dare, their soccer cleats against your porcine shin, that laugh, which sounded like a hundred birds escaping from a gunshot through the reeds-- and now you have to face it all again: the joyful freckled faces lost for words in supermarkets, as those red hands squeeze your own. It's been so long! They say. Amen. Oliver's poems, which she describes as "text-based home movies," unveil a cinematic vision of suburbia at once comical and poignant: framed to renew our curiosity in the mundane and pressing rhyme and metre to their utmost, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway is a five-star performance from Canada's new formalist sensation. "Alexandra Oliver is in full command of a saber wit and impeccable ear. Lucky the reader along for the ride."--JEANNE MARIE BEAUMONT "Brilliantly contemporary poems in traditional forms, the work of a stunning new voice."--CHARLES MARTIN Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, Canada and divides her time between Toronto and Glasgow, Scotland. Her most recent book is Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (Biblioasis). She currently teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

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In her second book, Alexandra Oliver takes us on a journey of escape from the suburbs of Canada to Glasgow, Scotland. Training her eye on the locals--on the streets, by rivers, in museums, on playgrounds, in their own homes, in the ill-starred town of Lockerbie--Oliver reflects on issues of exile, memory and identity, while traveling back into her own past.

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A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022Hail, The Invisible Watchman is haunted poetry—Oliver’s formal schemes are as tidy as a picket-fence and as suggestive; behind the charm of rhyme is a vibrant, dark exploration of domestic and social alienation.The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence—and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighbourhood. A spectral narrator surveils social gatherings in the town of Sherbet Lake; community members chime in, each revealing their various troubles and hypocrisies; an eerie reimagining of an Ethel Wilson novel follows a young woman into a taboo friendship with an enigmatic divorcée. In taut poetic structures across three succinct sections, Alexandra Oliver’s conflation of the mundane and the phantasmagoric produces a scintillating portrait of the suburban uncanny.

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Two contemporary poets turns their attention to poetry as a living, rhythmic, often musical performance. Their wide-ranging selections encompass epic, folk songs, the Romantics, the Victorians, poets of the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary hip hop. For many readers, the most familiar poetic metre is the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, but this only scratches the surface of the extraordinary diversity of rhythmic patterns that poets have employed over the ages. Measure for Measure has sections on Accentual Metre (Kipling, Bishop, Auden), Trochees (Blake, Dickinson, Dorothy Parker), Anapests (Byron, Frost, Langston Hughes); other sections cover iambs, ballads, and more exotic metres like amphibrachs, dipodics, hendecasyllabics and sapphics

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