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.


Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 04/14/2005
ISBN: 9781552452158
Pages: 101
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.70h x 4.70w x 0.40d

Review Citations: Quill & Quire 05/01/2009 pg. 46
New York Times Book Review 04/25/2010 pg. 18
New York Times Book Review 05/02/2010 pg. 22
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/05/2010 pg. 29