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Lisa Robertson (c) Joan Guenther
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Lisa Robertson was born 1961 in Toronto, Canada. Her poems are the perfect unity of abstraction and sensuality; in them the boundary between the lucidity of a thought and the eroticism of its poetic expression in language is lifted. Robertson also sees her work as a critique of neo-liberal capitalism from a feminist point of view. For her, thought itself is a form of political action taking place within the boundaries of our language.
Robertson deals with the tension between form, body and emotion, combining such different thematic areas as gender issues, weather forecasts and architecture, but also writes with equal knowledge of pornography and Baroque sentence structure and ornamentation. Her influences range from Lucretius and Virgil’s Eclogues to the Young Marble Giants, The Slits and Patti Smith. Her interests are so many and varied and the richness of her language is so astounding that the formation of synapses in the brains of her readers accelerates by leaps and bounds.
Lisa Robertson lives in Paris. As well as poems, she writes important essays and translates from the French.
Publications (a selection): The Apothecary, Tsunami, 1991; Debbie: An Epic, New Star, 1997; Soft Architecture: A Manifesto, Artspeak Gallery, 1999; The Weather, New Star, 2001; Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Clear Cut Press, 2003; Rousseau’s Boat, Nomados, 2004; The Men: A Lyric Book, BookThug, 2006; Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, Coach House Press, 2009; R's Boat, University of California Press, 2010; Nilling: Prose, BookThug, 2012; Cinema Of the Present, Coach House Press, 2014