A" New York Times" Notable Book of 2010
Longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize
Verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias, 19952007. 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...

Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson, the ambulatory Office for Soft Architecture. 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. There are also seven Walks, tours of Vancouver sites--poetic dioramas, really, and more material than cement could ever be. SOFT ARCHITECTURE exists at the crossroads of poetry, theory, urban geography and cultural...