Meet the Poet: Alexandra Oliver at BPL
A POETRY MONTH PRESENTATION
Join Alexandra Oliver, author of Hail, the Invisible Watchman (April 5, 2022) virtually at the Burlington Public Library! This event will take place over Zoom on Friday, April 8 at 2PM ET.
Register to attend here!
What does it take to conceive and create a poetry collection? With her latest collection, Hail the Invisible Watchman, launching on April 5, Burlington-based poet Alexandra Oliver is a seasoned veteran. She’ll be sharing her experience, insight, and wisdom with aspiring poets and readers intrigued by the creative writing process.
Preorder your copy of Hail, the Invisible Watchman here!
ABOUT HAIL, THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN
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.
ABOUT ALEXANDRA OLIVER
Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, BC. She is the author of Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (Biblioasis 2013, winner of the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Let the Empire Down (Biblioasis 2016), and the chapbook On the Oven Sits a Maiden (Frog Hollow Press 2018). She is the co-editor (with Annie Finch) of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House/Everyman’s Library 2015). A PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, she lives in Burlington, Ontario with her husband and son.
