Poetry. Lisa Robertson's latest book of poetry is a work that will be both familiar and fresh to anyone who has read her acclaimed work. 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. At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, THE MEN seeks to defamiliarize both who, and what, men are. "In THE MEN, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture"--Village Voice. "Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice.... Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia"--Boston Review.
About the author: Lisa Robertson (born on July 22 1961) in Toronto is a Canadian poet who currently lives in Oakland. In 1979, she moved to British Columbia, where she remained for twenty-three years. During her time there, she was a member of The Kootenay School of Writing, which is a non-profit society that offers an alternative to the mainstream pedagogy of most Canadian universities. Although it is not necessarily acknowledged as much as her ties to The Kootenay School of Writing, she was integrally involved in Vancouver's art scene. Robertson is an honorary board member of Artspeak Gallery. She has written on and reviewed exhibitions and pieces by Kelly Wood, Robert Garcet, Liz Magor, Allyson Clay, Kathy Slade, and Hadley+Maxwell, among others. She has also written on architecture and sites in British Columbia, such as New Brighton Park and Value Village. Robertson contributed the "Beneath the Pavilions" column to Mix from 1997-1999. She co-edited the poetry journal Raddle Moon with Susan Clark in Vancouver, and has worked as an arts journalist, a book seller, a copy editor, an astrologer, a guest lecturer, and an essayist. She has written on the work of Robin Blaser, Denise Riley, Dionne Brand, Peter Culley, Ted Berrigan, John Clare, Lorine Niedecker, Pauline Reage, Michele Bernstein and Albertine Sarrazin. In 2006, she was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley. Currently she is artist-in-residence at California College of the Arts, in San Francisco
Reviews:
http://matrixmagazine.org/reviews/2007/05/the-men-by-lisa-robertson/#more-21
http://loadsoflearnedlumber.blogspot.com/2008/08/lisa-robertson-men.html
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Robertson.html
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue10/reviews/robertson.htm
http://jacketmagazine.com/33/kennedy-robertson.shtml
