Alberta Book Awards 2009 - Juror Comments: "The award goes to a landmark volume that offers a wealth of superlative writing, humour and sharp social commentary. Innovative, beautifully designed and expertly marketed--this book achieved a perfect score in all areas. Particularly impressive was the long list of marketing activities, gaining the book success far beyond the expectations for Canadian poetry."
"Her creations have their genesis in a brilliant, encyclopedic, and inventive mind and are brought to fruition through meticulous craftsmanship." Canadian Literature, Spring 2007
"A series of narrative poems told during coffee breaks, [The Office Tower Tales] is probably also Alice Major's greatest work..As the allusion to Sheherazad implies, women have used stories to survive their subjugation in male-dominated cultures, but also to express the nature of women's broader experiences of childbirth, relationships and illness..an ambitious, accessible, and entirely provocative exploration of the power of women's stories." Jay Smith, Vue Weekly, March 27, 2008
"What makes this collection is the sheer focus of the project, the quality of the writing in a poetry book nearly novelistic in its approach, taking in [Major's] years of living and working in the downtown core of the city....a highly ambitious and fully-formed work." rob mclennan, http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2008/03/alice-majors-office-tower-tales-with.html
"Alice Major's tremendous new book of poetry takes a cue from a sprawling epic of English literature, The Canterbury Tales, but grounds its pilgrims in present-day Edmonton and the meaningless office drudgery of the 9-to-5 life....Each story has a five-line stanza form, and each stanza contains a rhyme and closes with a short line. 'I needed something that would sound conversational and give me strong rhythmic presence as well,' Major said. 'It's a project where you're solving all the problems and challenges of poetry as well as the challenges of fiction. There were days when I wondered why I had set the limbo bar quite that low.' The Office Tower Tales are populated by solitary souls working and loving and growing old in an urban world. There's a young woman who longs to become a police officer; a waitress torn between her girlfriend and her fundamentalist church; the office romeo from accounts payable; and a single woman "on the short cord of a secretary's pay" who tries to fit in at work by fabricating a family. There's a good deal of yearning in these pages but also a healthy dose of humour and, finally, of hope." Richard Helm, Edmonton Journal, April 11, 2008
"This long poetic work is both extremely readable and erudite. My first reading of the book was to enjoy the understated and solid poetry and to take in the modern themes. The food court descriptions are exquisitely captured in the prologues. References that might not work in another type of poem gleam here. Instead of Mount Olympus or the road to Canterbury as backdrop, here there are skyscrapers, fast-food kiosks and plastic chairs overlooking a heavily trafficked street. Sheherazade tells wide-ranging stories about abortion, breast cancer, divorce, threatened rape, and more....My second reading of the tales involved hauling out a stack of marginally dusty books from my English undergrad days -- a Norton anthology or two, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Ovid, Hesiod, and a classical mythology textbook. There is a lot of fun to be had comparing Major's tales to her precursors, and in working out how her Pandora relates to the Pandora of ancient Greece, but the scholarly context isn't necessary to draw pleasure from this book." Shawna Lemay, Edmonton Journal, April 27, 2008
#8 on the Maclean's Magazine list of Edmonton Non-Fiction Bestsellers.
