Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip
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.
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.
