Welcome to the Anthropocene

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" Poetry, science, ecological calamity, and human-driven climate change. Where do we fit in the universe? Notes "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, January 1, 2018 # 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 11, 2018 # 10 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 18, 2018 "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." Patrick O'Reilly, Maisonneuve, Winter 2017, December 6, 2017 "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] "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, Canadian Notes & Queries, June 1, 2018 "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." Roger Caldwell, London Grip Poetry Review, August 6, 2018 [Full review at http://londongrip.co.uk/2018/08/london-grip-poetry-review-alice-major/] "Welcome to the An