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Poetry Canadian

The Weather

by (author) Lisa Robertson

Publisher
New Star Books
Initial publish date
May 2001
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780921586814
    Publish Date
    May 2001
    List Price
    $16.00

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Where to buy it

Description

"One of Canada's best poets ... Robertson's language is sparkling and sharp, and builds momentum through its rhythmic motion motion to produce a dense and difficult, but enjoyable and readable book ... The Weather rewrites the pastoral with confidence and cunning."
Prairie Fire
"Hip, cerebral, streamlined, and dense, The Weather is about many things, including the poles of ecstasy and intellectualism..."
The Stranger
"Lisa Robertson knows where she is headed, but this is not the only reason that she is a trustworthy writer. Her work results from a reading practice in which words continue to disturb the poet, who is always just beginning to accept that there is more justice in literature than outside it."
n+1
[A] stunning and severely rich repatterning of the mind's generally uncharted terrain.
Publishers Weekly
A revelation...
Artforum
Light and air, greenery and earth take on unaccustomed qualities in the poet’s deft hand in this long poem from Lisa Robertson. Seven sections — "Sunday" to "Saturday," alternating prose and verse, repattern quotidian conversations and atmospheres: "bright and fresh," "brisk and west," "streaky and massed," January to December. A constellation of radical women is invoked to pass, elegiac, among clouds: Violette Leduc, Patty Hearst, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Shulamith Firestone, Ti–grace Atkinson. This is exhilarating poetry, wild and trouble, that seamlessly integrated lived experience with the play in mind. It is sure to entrance.

 

The Weather won the 2002 Relit Award for Poetry.

About the author

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

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