Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing!

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 brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage.