Full Description
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.
Contents
The Promise We Made to the Earthquake Chinese Food with Gavra, Aged Three Ottawa Walk-in Clinic Waiting Room, 9 p.m Preschool Party Music Rimsky Korsakov on Fifth Avenue The Village Arsonist The Widows A Child's Christmas in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Curriculum Vitae Sexual History The Classics Lesson The Test Cape Template for a Conversation with a Single Friend One of These Days Voted Best Place to Live Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway Doug Hill The Girls and the Eels The Gulls Using the Public Binoculars at Sherbet Lake Discovery Centre Escaping the Ice Mrs. Miller Lays It Out to Her Daughter at the Audition, March 23, 1985 Fixing the Old Folks' Home How Are You, Bunny? Taking Care What You Want the Doctor to Tell You Over a Faberge Owl The Toy Catalogue of the Afterlife The Ghosts of the Space Dogs The Released Ones Lost Twins Bad Influence and Senior Kindergarten The GO Train Arithmetic Song Modern Camera Explaining Filial Piety to My Brother in the Bar A Serbian Man in a Bar Said If I Knew The Enigma of Fate Eulogy for Ken Spada Final Request The Hand of Scheveningen
