Description

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A New York Times Notable Book of 2010

Longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize

Verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias, 1995-2007. Collected by Elisa Sampedrin.

Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past -- its ideas, its personages, its syntax -- to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language -- whiplike -- casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage. Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

About the Author

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Lisa Robertson's books of poetry include XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic (nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1998), The Weather (winner of the Relit Award for Poetry in 2002), The Men and Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip. University of California Press will publish Rousseau's Boat in Spring 2010. She currently teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and in Fall 2010 was a writer in residence at Simon Fraser University.

Praise For…

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'Here as in six earlier glittering books, Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy ... Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt ... Though she wields ... language expertly, even beautifully, she also shows an almost pagan delight in embodiment.' New York Times

'Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.' The Village Voice

'Robertson is one of our most crisply intelligent writers, and the poems and prose pieces in Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip ... continually knock readers off their conventional responses, asking that they follow the curlicues of thought-in-motion the writing displays.' Canadian Literature

'Magenta Soul Whip manages to exist in a universe of its own making, in which Baudelaire and Lucretius both make appearances, as do Jesus Christ and the adulteress he saved from stoning, a conversational dog, and contemporary Canadian visual artist Lucy Hogg. The book teaches us how to read it as it unfolds for us page by page.' Jerry Magazine

'[Robertson's] preoccupations are as much lyrical and communicative ... as they are intellectual.' Quill and Quire