I want an ingenious fibre to be treated as funny tragedy expressing a classic argument against materialism which runs like this: which changes of costume are bound to be dangerous?

The Apothecary is an extinct fern called a sentence unfurling in the mists. It is also Lisa Robertson’s first book. Originally published in a small edition by Tsunami Editions in Vancouver in 1991, it quietly disappeared until it was re-released in 2001 on a need-to-know-basis. Book*hug is now pleased to make this text available in a more permanent and pleasing edition.

The Apothecary stems from the author’s desire to remake the sentence—to let it be capacious, preposterous, convivial, and to hang it from a pronoun worn like a phantom limb. Robertson wants that ghostly pronoun to reinvent itself afresh in each sentence. Looking towards the eighteenth century, sometimes through a lens occasionally borrowed from contemporary sources, the text of The Apothecary is precise, intoxicating materia medica dispensed by one of Canada’s most important contemporary poets at the beginning of her career with the use of florid instruments.

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet and essayist currently living in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a longtime resident of Vancouver, where in the early 90s she began writing, publishing and collaborating in a community of artists and poets that included Artspeak Gallery and The Kootenay School of Writing. She has continued these activities for 30 years, publishing books, leaflets and posters, translating poetry and linguistics from French, lecturing and teaching internationally, and continuing her ongoing study into the political constitution of lyric voice. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018, the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in NY awarded her the inaugural CD Wright Award in Poetry. She has taught at Cambridge University, Princeton, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Piet Zwart Institute, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and American University of Paris, as well as holding research and residency positions at institutions across Canada, the US, and Europe.

Lisa Robertson's profile page