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.

Author Hometown: Burnaby, BC CAN



About the author: Lisa Robertson's books of poetry include XECLOGUE, DEBBIE: AN EPIC (nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1998), THE WEATHER (winner of the Relit Award for Poetry in 2002), THE MEN and LISA ROBERTSON'S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP. University of California Press published Rousseau's Boat in Spring 2010. She is currently writer in residence at Simon Fraser University.

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
Alan Gilbert in The Village Voice
http://jacketmagazine.com/33/kennedy-robertson.shtml