The Office Tower Tales

Alice Major

The University of Alberta Press, 252 pp.

The long poem is a Canadian favourite. We refined it, we perfected it and we do it better and longer than anyone else. It is definitive of Canadian poetry. So what do you do when a Canadian writes a first-class book-length poem that has nothing to do with Canada? There are no beavers, nobody plows a majestic field and nobody comes of age in the northern Ontario bush.

Alice Major does just this. In her book The Office Tower Tales, she takes her cue from the Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights instead of Margaret Atwood or Robert Kroetsch, and pens a collection entirely in narrative verse that could take place in almost any office tower anywhere in the world.

The book centres on three women, Sheherazad, Aphrodite and Pandora, who meet for coffee breaks and “daily liberation” from their pink-collar jobs. Major pokes fun at any societal assumptions that may exist about secretarial hen parties and the banalities that may be discussed therein, by showing us that when left to their own devices these women intelligently debate homophobia, promiscuity, abortion and all sorts of hot-button issues.

In The Mother’s Story a woman is forced to say goodbye to her daughters who are conjoined twins. The tale is loaded, but not loaded down, with beautiful imagery like, “My daughters opened from each other/ like the paired wings/ of a butterfly” and “They lay [...], like twinned halves/ of a chestnut.”

Alternately, in The Tale of the Gingerbread Girl, Major takes a light-hearted look at motherhood. When a woman pays all her money to a “mad fellow in the forest” to make her a child out of gingerbread, the skeptical aunt criticizes the amount of icing, silver balls and chocolate sprinkles that must be used to keep the child in skirts and sunhats.

Major writes each tale in the style most suitable for it, flirting with many different genres instead of confining herself to one. Some are short, funny and fantastical. Others are heart-wrenchingly, depressingly real.

While the topics covered may seem to be traditionally feminine issues, the book’s appeal is by no means limited to women, and it is entirely accessible by the most novice poetry reader. Major’s quick sketches during the arbitrariness of a coffee break manage to humanize the modern office worker if not completely elevating her to transcendence.