Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway

Co-op available Galleys available at BEA Possible blurbs from Charles Martin, Kim Bridgford, Richard Wilbur (whom she's met), A.E. Stallings, Franz Wright, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Michael Lista, Lynne Crosbie, and (believe it or not), Wes Anderson. We have contact info for/she knows/has met/has read with or other connections to all. Is connected to: the West Chester Poetry Conference (Kim Bridgford, Philadelphia); Taylor Mali in NYC (organizer of the Urbana Slam & the Page Meets Stage Series); Bob Holman, NYC, owner of the Bowery Poetry Club; Jeffrey McDaniel, NYC poet, connected to Sarah Lawrence; Anna M. Evans/Quincy Lehr of the Carmine St. Metrics reading series/The Raintown Review; in LA to Timothy Steele, Leslie Monsour, and Julie Kane (poet laureate of LA); in Seattle, Lana Hechtman Ayers, who would organize a reading, Daemond Arrindel, organizer of the Seattle Slam, Elizabeth Austen (NPR), Jeremy Richards (also radio), and visual artist Hanita Schwartz. Again, we have contact information for all of them. National radio campaign (targeting NPR/The Writers Almanac/Tell Me More, plus anyone AO's ever spoken with on-air) National print campaign targeting Poetry, Verse Daily, The New Criterion, Poets & Writers, Poetry Show, Parnassus, Slate, NPR.org/David Orr; again will make shameless use of AO's connections Possible promotional videos through her film connections Print campaign will also target poetry bloggers/reviewers Promotion through www.alexandraoliver.ca Social media campaign with focus on poetry performance videos/YouTube Goodreads giveaways Promotional broadsides

"Here are brilliantly contemporary poems in traditional forms, the work of a stunning new voice."--Charles MartinA 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.