Occupied World: Currents in Canadian Literature

In ancient Roman times rituals were performed to sanctify the ground on which new cities were founded. With this invocation, space could then be occupied. In her brilliant new collection, Alice Major’s poems concern themselves with human occupation: how we occupy cities; how we occupy ourselves as citizens, workers and thinkers; how we occupy mythologies and metaphors; and how we occupy the passage of our lives. Written largely in a public voice, these poems invoke human preoccupations that resonate through landscapes of time and space.