Lisa Robertson

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.

Poet and essayist Lisa Robertson has held residencies at the California College of the Arts, Cambridge University; University of California, Berkeley; UC San Diego; and American University of Paris. Her books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic (nominated for the Governor General's Award in Canada), The Men, The Weather, R's Boat (poetry) and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (essays). Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House) was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010, and was longlisted for the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing. She won the inaugural C. D. Wright Award. She currently lives in France.

The author’s research on troubadour poetry yields this experiment in thinking ‘near and with’ philosopher and political activist Simone Weil. Moving between the epistolary, poetry, performance and scholarly research, it centres on a new translation of Weil’s 1942 essay ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of’ that elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance rejecting force in all its forms. Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this concept from the violent context in which it emerged to the troubling conditions of the present. Embracing actualised and suppressed histories, the work testifies to words, friendship and readership as resistance across distances.

With a contribution by Benny Nemer

Design: Rietlanden Women’s Office

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris ... This is the legend of a she-dandy's life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson's first novel.

'As far as I'm concerned, it's already a classic.' - Anne Boyer

‘In De vulgare eloquentia, Dante developed a poetics of the vernacular – the collectively accessible speech of the household and the street, distributed unilaterally rather than intentionally acquired via a disciplined pedagogy of grammar, and transformed in open bodily exchange, irrespective of social position, gender or rank. “The vernacular,” Dante says, “[is] the language which children gather from those around them when they first begin to articulate words; or more briefly, that which we learn without any rules at all by imitating our nurses.” A vernacular is not structured according to a valuing hierarchy or an administration of history; it is improvised in tandem with the rhythmic needs and movements of a present-tense yet tradition-informed body among other bodies, each specific. There is no general vernacular; it is intrinsically grammarless. Vernacular speech can only ever begin and can never achieve closure. Refusing spatial propriety, it crisscrosses institutions. In Dante’s definition, it is what’s spoken by women and children, thus it is the first, and natural language: “The whole world uses it through its diverse pronunciations and forms”.’ – from Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship. 

Lisa Robertson’s reflection of political subject formation, through poetry and vernacular forms, acts as a critical anchor for the ideas and experiments published in this new series, Dialecty. 

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating colour? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun ‘you’? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema?

These and other questions are answered in the new long poem from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley + Maxwell.

Revolution: A Reader collects texts from across many cultures and times and organises them roughly along a chronology of living, from 'beginning' to 'childhood', 'education', 'adulthood' and 'death'. The book brings the embodied fact of revolution into the lived present by engaging readers with language that takes us there, no matter where we are to begin with. We are all in revolution, now. Reading can make this fact primary and conscious and shared.

Heavily annotated throughout, the book is, quite literally, a conversation. The annotations, by Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler "composed simultaneously and in response to one another“ stitch a web of arguments that link the book into a single thing, a reader. The book also features a narrative bibliography of revolution by David Brazil.

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays - many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries - on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you'll ever read.

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.

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.

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."

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.

First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XECLOGUE is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late-twentieth-century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General's Award finalist, plays in a neo-classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees for her rich and exuberant work.

What do gardens mean and how can they change the world? A Garden Manifesto gathers radical visions rooted in the earth from artists, writers, gardeners and activists, among them Lubaina Himid, Derek Jarman, Jamaica Kincaid, Ana Mendieta, Dan Pearson and Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s a seed box for an uncertain future, packed with anarchic dreams of Eden-making and humming with resistance to the colonial project of homogenisation and destruction.

Featuring William Blake, Joe Brainard, Jonny Bruce, John Clare, Gerry Dalton, Ellen Dillon, Baha Ebdeir, Alys Fowler, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Gaylene Gould, Green Guerillas, Joy Gregory, Fritz Haeg, Lubaina Himid, Philip Hoare, Rosie Hudson, Derek Jarman, Chantal Joffe, Laura Joy, Jamaica Kincaid, Elisabeth Kley, Olivia Laing, Jeremy Lee, Siobhan Liddell, Alison Lloyd, Hilary Lloyd, Jo McKerr, Lee Mary Manning, Ana Mendieta, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Huw Morgan, Eileen Myles, Hussein Omar, Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, Ian Patterson, Dan Pearson, Jean Perréal, Charlie Porter, Pat Porter, J. H. Prynne, Claire Ratinon, Jamie Reid, Lisa Robertson, Kuba Ryniewicz, Saadi, Sui Searle, Sei Shōnagon, Colin Stewart, Tabboo!, Edward Thomasson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Scott Treleaven, John Wieners, David Wojnarowicz, Matt Wolf and Sarah Wood

Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson

Studio Visit collects two decades of work by Brooklyn-based artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty (born 1978), known for her material transformation of photographs and her use of comedy as an artistic strategy. Organized by material sensibilities around paper, plastic, glass, metal, fabric scraps, and "garbage," Studio Visit rethinks the monograph format, revealing Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s practice through intimate studio documentation, sketches, notes, and other ephemera, punctuated by full-color case studies of major works. 

With image descriptions by art historian Kate Nesin and new writing by Kristan Kennedy and Oscar Bedford, as well as reprinted texts by poet Lisa Robertson and media scholar Shannon Mattern, among others, Studio Visitsurveys Sara Greenberger Rafferty's cultural commentary through dynamic and conceptually rigorous art. 

A collection of lectures transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University's Summer Writing Program that represent a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. 

New Weathers asks us to consider how poetics might embolden deeper engagements with the world. Collected from the alternative education zone founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg with the aim of opening up discourse and fostering political engagement, these texts invoke issues of gender and race-based injustice, the global climate crisis, and our possible extinction. They weave through our poetic community, the conversations we are having, the issues we are facing—our "new weathers" to posit strategies of resistance. 

List of Contributors: Paula Gunn Allen, Amiri Baraka, Dan Beachy-Quick, Sherwin Bitsui, Robin Blaser, William S. Burroughs, Julie Carr, J'Lyn Chapman, Jos Charles, Jack Collom, Samuel R. Delany, kari edwards, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tonya M. Foster, Forrest Gander, Alan Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Renee Gladman, Robert Glück, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Thurston Moore, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Margaret Randall, Roger Reeves, Ariana Reines, Lisa Robertson, Ed Sanders, Andrew Schelling, Cedar Sigo, Eleni Sikelianos, Harry Smith, Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Asiya Wadud, Peter Warshall, Eliot Weinberger, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

I travel far across the city, cut it knowingly, concealing behind me the entrances to tunnels, altering the signage. I traverse the grimiest bowels, skirt the farthest wettest edges like a silverfish active only in the hallucinatory hours, to avoid becoming known, to avoid any collusion between my body and theirs, its. 

Under the neon sky of a sick city, which might be London, a nameless governess oscillates between lucidity and dissociation, solitude and communication, wage labour and escape attempts. A wild and unreliable narrator-without-character—ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid—she embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance. Simultaneously demonic and angelic, both maniacal and generous in her fury, accidentally elegant, tongue tied and barbed, she veers towards defiance as devotion. An anti-Bildungsroman in the collapsing first person, Yes, I Am A Destroyer is an unbecoming record of memory and forgetting, of a relentless undoing. 

‘Any girl who learns how to read is already a lost girl, wrote the infamous confessionalist Rousseau. But if that lost girl, with insatiable pronoun, bastard spawn perhaps of the exiled Genevan, palmed a pen and confessed—how would that read? What can she know? With relentless intelligence and urgent prosody, Mira Mattar shows us. She invents a narrator in the raging anti-tradition of Violette Leduc and Albertine Sarrazin, leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection. Much like the young Jean-Jacques, she’s a tutor underpaid for her sensitivity. She is, like him, a thief of small things, a sponge for the edifying comportments of the employing class. What she makes of her servitude—a fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing—is dedicated to female anger. Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance.  ‘Live anyway’ is her stoic motto. This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.’ 
–> Lisa Robertson 

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. A Palestinian/Jordanian born in the suburbs of London, she continues to live and work there. She has read and published her work widely. Yes, I Am A Destroyer is her first book.

Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels and Vancouver. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Le Chauffage brings together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities with the  intent to spark discussion and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.

The second issue of Le Chauffage contains photographs and texts, photographs of text, photographs as text and vice versa. Loosely thinking through the format of The Photo Essay celebrated by John Szarkowski in an eponymously titled exhibition at MoMA in 1965, this issue considers some of the artistic possibilities that can be found in such an archaic and historically male-dominated form. 

Many of the contributions that make up this second issue are not photo essays per se. But each one of them considers the printed page as a space in its own right. The magazine becomes an interior where words and images entertain a malleable and distinctly porous relationship. At times, it is also a space where artists and writers from different cities were invited to meet and collaborate. And since interest in other people is also an interest in yourself, it is always unclear who is really transforming who?

Contributions by: Bob Cain & Linda Miller, Moyra Davey, Laurie Kang, Niklas Taleb, Madeleine Paré & Diane Severin Nguyen, Josephine Pryde, Slow Reading Club, Ken Lum, Isaac Thomas, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Artun Alaska Arasli & Graeme Wahn, Stephen Waddell, Maya Beaudry & Chloe Chignell, Lisa Robertson, groana melendez, Victoria Antoinette Megens and Will Holder.

Editors: Emile Rubino and Felix Rapp
Co-Editor: Francesca Percival
Design: Francesca Percival and Felix Rapp
Cover Design: Francesca Percival
Printed by: Cassochrome, Belgium
Edition of 350

Electric Brine is a volume of poetry and critical essays by women voices from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction, each of them central to the independent curatorial research entity The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO, 2014-ongoing) and its associated online study group Matter in Flux.

Conceived as an anthology and a register, it serves as a testimony to the initiative's long-standing work of creative adaptation and ecological inquiry through a quest to situate a vision of material politics through the lens of six punctuated pieces on flow and fluids. The literary and scientific fabulations found in these pages speak of the conjunction of lived embodiment, the materialized quality of language, and the ability to trigger political imagination through reading, writing and witnessing. Each of these strands polyperform under TWWWO, for they can be traced, retroactively, to the themes present in the live event series, to Matter in Flux's private study sessions, to the initiative's collective writing work presented in public venues and publications. Also included in this volume is an appendix documenting the years of invitation and study, intricately linked to the ideological praxis of these overlaps.

Co-founded in 2014 by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes, The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO) is an independent curatorial research-based entity that collaborates with artists, scientists, science historians, philosophers, anthropologists, activists and more as it explores themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. TWWWO began as a live talk-event series over the telephone and has thus expanded to other formats involving experiments with educational actions, discursive talks, and events via diverse methodologies.

Introduction by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes.
Texts and contributions by Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker, Lisa Robertson. 

Graphic design: Sophie Keij & Atelier Brenda.

First launched in 2012, and published by mfc michèle didier (micheledidier.com), == is a small-run arts publication, edited by Matt Keegan. ==#2, 2015, is designed by Su Barber and published in an edition of 500 by Capricious Publishing. Barber and Keegan worked together on North Drive Press (northdrivepress.com) between 2005-2010, and this publication shares a variety of traits with NDP.

==#2 is a non-thematic arts publication contained in a box with a 96-page bound volume featuring artist-to-artist interviews, texts, and transcriptions. Six loose multiples are also included.

Contributors include: Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Judith Barry, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Bozhkov, Milano Chow, Anna Craycroft, Lucky DeBellevue, Cristina Delgado, Haytham El-Wardany, Jake Ewert, Vincent Fecteau, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Harrell Fletcher, Rachel Foullon, Aurélien Froment, Kenny Greenberg, Calla Henkel, Leslie Hewitt, Jaya Howey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Iman Issa, Ruba Katrib, Jill Magid, Jo Nigoghossian, Aaron Peck, Max Pitegoff, David Placek, Olivia Plender, Lisa Robertson, Andrew Russeth, Amy Sillman, Diane Simpson, Greg Parma Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.

In Derek McCormack's home province, farm boys with growing pains enjoy a little-known meal called bed-supper, a hearty bowl of sweet breakfast cereal enjoyed as a midnight snack. Here McCormack has composed a peculiarly salacious bed-supper, where the long secret sweet-tooth of the Marquis de Sade glints as it sinks into the dirtiest of dishes. This useful book will more than stay your appetite until breakfast — Castle Faggot is also a manual of redecoration, a musical, a puppet show, a theory of cosmetics, a work of poetics, and a glorious celebration of the French decadence. — Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

Derek McCormack is a writer who lives in Toronto. His previous books include The Show that Smells and The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(e)).

This first comprehensive monograph encompasses the manifold painterly practice of Allison Katz. Gathering together Katz's successive bodies of works since the beginning of the 2010s, the publication includes essays by Oakville Galleries director Frances Loeffler, art critic Kirsty Bell, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, and The MIT List Visual Arts Center Director Yuri Stone.

Texts by Kirsty Bell, Allison Katz, Frances Loeffler, Lisa Robertson, Yuri Stone, Camilla Wills.

Where are the tiny revolts? is the first book in a new annual series published by CCA Wattis Institute, a contemporary art center and research institute in San Francisco. Each book in the series is driven by a central question: what are we learning from artists today? Unconnected to an exhibition program, Where are the tiny revolts? is rooted in the Wattis's artist-driven research institute. It is a place to explore and share some of the texts and visual work that emerge over the course of an entire year of discussions and public programs. Instead of providing documentation of projects with artists, Where are the tiny revolts? offers other ideas, voices, and references generated by conversations with and about artists. 

The first book in the series, informed by themes related to the work of Dodie Bellamy, revolves around questions related to contemporary forms of feminism and sexualities, the rebirth of the author, and ways in which vulnerability, perversion, vulgarity, and self-exposure can be forms of empowerment. The texts cover a broad array of styles, including memoir, theoretical essay, art historical analysis, poetry, and fiction. The visual elements are equally diverse, ranging from photographs to collage to drawing.

Texts by Sara Ahmed, Nicole Archer, Georges Bataille, Dodie Bellamy, Michele Carlson, Thomas Clerc, Combahee River Collective, Bob Flanagan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Johanna Hedva, Glen Helfand, Juliana Huxtable, Alex Kitnick, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Lisa Robertson; contributions by Marcela Pardo Ariza, Justin G. Binek, Kaucyila Brooke, Tammy Rae Carland, Mary Beth Edelson, Mike Kuchar, Anne McGuire, Patrick Staff, Frances Stark, Rosemarie Trockel.