Alexandra Oliver: Re-Birth Live Poetry Reading
313 W Huntington Ave
Jonesboro, AR 72401
USA
Delta Poets are bringing in featured poet Alexandra Oliver (Hail, the Invisible Watchman) from Canada to join local poets for a live reading at the Glass Factory in Arkansas! Opening music by classical guitarist Adrian Little—while you mingle and enjoy some food and drinks from Urban Organics. The reading will take place on Saturday, April 15 at 6PM (CDT). The live readings start promptly at 7PM (doors will be shut at 6:55; no more entry after this time). This will be a show you do NOT want to miss!
Details and tickets here.
Order your copy of Hail, the Invisible Watchman here!
Check out Alexandra Oliver’s previous poetry collections 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.
Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, BC. She is the author of three collections published through Biblioasis: Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (2013; recipient of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Let the Empire Down ( 2016), and Hail, the Invisible Watchman (2022). Her libretto for From the Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, conceived in conjunction with composer Scott Wilson at the University of Birmingham, was performed by Continuum Music in Toronto in December, 2017. Oliver is a past co-editor of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Everyman’s Library/Random House, 2015) as well as of the formalist journal The Rotary Dial. She has performed her work for CBC Radio and NPR, as well as at The National Poetry Slam and numerous festivals and conferences. Oliver holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and a Ph.D. in English from McMaster University. She lives in Burlington, Ontario with her husband and son.
