Lisa Robertson Books

"In 2004, boldly original poet Lisa Robertson published a chapbook, Rousseau's Boat, poems culled from years of notebooks that are, nevertheless, by no means autobiographical. In 2010, she expanded the work into a full-length book, R's Boat. During the pandemic, she was drawn back into decades of journals to shape Boat. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson's ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself."-- Provided by publisher

The Path of Life helps readers uncover joy on the path of life--the promises, the journey, and the destiny.

Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence.

Literary Nonfiction. NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading. I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love.

A twenty-five-frames-per-second look at the kinetic, cinematic self by a master poet.

Poetry. Lisa Robertson's latest book of poetry is a work that will be both familiar and fresh to anyone who has read her acclaimed work. THE MEN explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Dante's work on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey-a subjectivity that honors all the ambivalence, doubt and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance, and it is this troubled texture of identity that she examines in THE MEN. At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, THE MEN seeks to defamiliarize both who, and what, men are. "In THE MEN, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture"--Village Voice. "Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice.... Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia"--Boston Review.

I want an ingenious fibre to be treated as funny tragedy expressing a classic argument against materialism which runs like this: which changes of costume are bound to be dangerous? The Apothecary is an extinct fern called a sentence unfurling in the mists. It is also Lisa Robertson's first book. Originally published in a small edition by Tsunami Editions in Vancouver in 1991, it quietly disappeared until it was re-released in 2001 on a need-to-know-basis. BookThug is now pleased to make this text available in a more permanent and pleasing edition. The Apothecary stems from the author's desire to remake the sentence � to let it be capacious, preposterous, convivial, and hang it from a pronoun worn like a phantom limb. Robertson wants that ghostly pronoun to reinvent itself afresh in each sentence. Looking towards the eighteenth century, sometimes through a lens occasionally borrowed from contemporary sources, the text of The Apothecary is precise, intoxicating materia medica dispensed by one of Canada's most important contemporary posts at the beginning of her career with the use of florid instruments.

Pompoms, blackberries and Value Village: Take a stroll through the thoughts of one of Canada's most intriguing poets and thinkers.

I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed in purple. Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from sentiment. Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my senses. The boldly original Canadian poet Lisa Robertson has received high praise for the uncompromising intelligence and style of her poetry. In R's Boat, she brings us to the crossroads of poetry, theory, the body, and cultural criticism. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson's ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself. Praise for Lisa Robertson's The Men: "In The Men, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture."-Village Voice "Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice. . . . Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia."-Boston Review

The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire.