"Because the universe is big and all but incomprehensible, the average Jills and Joes don't dare ask too many existential questions. It is left to poets to face the truth in those places the rest of us fear to tread. The author of eleven books of poetry and essays, Edmonton's first poet laureate, and a woman comfortable in the realms of math, science, and cosmology, Alice Major is uniquely qualified to guide humanity through perilous ecological times. Thank you, Alice." -- Foreword Magazine, 20180101
"Poets work like naturalists or scientists. What they do is based on what has gone before. Alexander Pope wrote Essay on Man, one of the most quoted poems in the English language, in the 18th century... This collection is written in Alberta, in the 21st century. Its title poem, "Welcome to the Anthropocene", has the same metre and rhyme scheme, and uses Pope's poem as a platform for a survey of the world the poet sees.... There are a number of other fine poems, of varying lengths, touching a lot of subjects, with influences that seem to range from Gerard Manley Hopkins to a Peterson Field Guide.... The poems are serious, but the reader can expect to have fun reading them." [Full review at http://canadianfieldnaturalist.ca/index.php/cfn/article/view/2087/1968] -- Murray Citron -- The Canadian Field-Naturalist, vol. 131, no.4, 2017
"There are poems about the workaday world, a poem written in the voice of a mouse, a poem about missing the Muse's house call because the poet--damn hygiene!--was in the shower." -- Bruce Whiteman, Canadian Notes & Queries -- 20180601
"Alice Major is that rarest of beings, a poet whose imagination is fired by science and mathematics.... [W]ith her broad range of sympathies and wide-ranging curiosity we have a sense of inclusiveness rare in contemporary poetry (which often prefers to live in a world of its own), and a comprehensive vision not afraid of dealing with public issues.... This is poetry with a brain as well as a heart--it not only makes us feel but also succeeds in making us think." [Full review at http://londongrip.co.uk/2018/08/london-grip-poetry-review-alice-major/] -- Roger Caldwell, London Grip -- London Grip Poetry Review, 20180806
"Alice Major begins "Welcome to the Anthropocene" by considering all the ways humans have meddled with the environment... The traditional and experimental forms which appear throughout the book reinforce Major's argument...and hint at unseen evolutionary forces at work; rhyming couplets which make up the first poem call to mind the 'base pairs' of DNA, even as they echo Pope's 'An Essay on Man.'... She excels at depicting situations when humans are themselves little more than kind animals, unusually intelligent but never quite intelligent enough, and often confounded by their own place in the ecosphere. -- Patrick O'Reilly -- Maisonneuve, Winter 2017, 20171206
"Welcome to the Anthropocene is a virtuosic, challenging book of poetry by Alice Major. This collection is by turns a lament, a dirge and a celebration of being on earth in this human-dominated moment.... It is a compelling book of tightly wrought, deeply skilled verse that contains within it the seeds of hope.... Major's ecologically minded poems demonstrate anew why poetry and art play leading roles in helping us to conceive of better times that are yet to come." Kit Dobson, Alberta Views, October 2018
"In Welcome to the Anthropocene, Major is not offering a guide to action so much as a guide to broadening the problem beyond the sometimes pat suggestions of political and environmental activists.... What Major adds here is the duality of the Anthropocene: our despair in the face of it and the fact that whether we avoid, protest, reform, or embrace this new world, we are still in it." - Hannah Rogers, November 27, 2018, LA Review of Books
# 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 11, 2018
# 10 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 18, 2018
