3 Summers
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A grappling with time, form and embodiment.
Recite your poem to your aunt.
I threw myself to the ground.
Where were you in the night?
In a school among the pines.
What was the meaning of the dream?
Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The ten poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time – embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences – can tell.
‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy ... Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt ... She wields language expertly, even beautifully.'
—The New York Times
‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.'
—The Village Voice
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her captivating latest collection, Robertson (Cinema of the Present) declares that "it's time to return to the sex of my thinking," musing on the materiality of the body as poem and the poem as body. Several of the collection's 11 pieces were commissioned for specific projects, yet clear themes emerge: form, embodiment, borders and boundaries, repetition, time, and learning. "The work will be called the linguistics of the hormone," she writes, nodding toward hormonal influence on bodily development. As each poem unfolds, the reader becomes attuned to the form, learning it on the fly. "You could say that form is learning," Robertson writes, later echoing the sentiment: "repetition is never exact this is why/ form is learning." The collection abounds with lists and litanies, a plethora of folds and sutures, organs and body parts. In places, those parts transform into objects or animals, as in "the hand is a rustic cheeseplate" or "the fingers are a phalanx/ of snakes or of fishes." As if repeating elements of her own oeuvre reinforces its form and her study of it, Robertson sprinkles references to her previous work alongside considerations of Karl Marx, Lucretius, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Readers seeking resolutely playful intellectual experiments will find in Robertson "the juiciness and joy of form."
