Books by Lisa Robertson

The Women of Duck Commander: Surprising Insights from the Women Behind the Beards About What Makes This Family Work

by Korie Robertson, Kay Robertson, Missy Robertson, Jessica Robertson, Lisa Robertson

Matriarch Miss Kay, Korie, Missy, Jessica, and Lisa Robertson speak out in this insightful book about their roles in the crazy Robertson family and the core values that make this family work.

An Inside Look at the Robertson Women

In the pages of this book, you’ll find both fun and inspirational stories . . .

Kay shares the honest story of her relationship with Phil—and his wild and philandering years—and the challenges of being a teenage mother. Even more amazing, she shares the forgiveness she offered Phil and how they have now celebrated forty-eight years of marriage.

Korie tells of her first encounter with Phil when she was in just the fifth grade. At that first meeting Phil came right out and told her what good husbands his boys would make and that she should keep an eye on them. She also shares the reaction her parents had when she told them that she and Willie were getting married when she was only eighteen.

Missy tells the story of their daughter, Mia, who was born with a cleft palate, and their adjustments to this condition and Mia’s joyful spirit that inspires them all.

Jessica recounts her first conversation with Jep and how unimpressed she was when Jep bragged that his dad was the Duck Commander Phil Robertson. She told him she’d heard of Daffy Duck, Donald Duck, and Duck, Duck, Goose— but not the Duck Commander.

Lisa reveals the serious marriage problems she and Al had—problems that almost ended their marriage for good—and how they worked through those issues to have a more stable and loving marriage than she ever imagined possible.

Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias (Department of Critical Thought, 6)

by Lisa Robertson

"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt’s idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don’t exist. That is, they appear in the text’s absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading’s supple snare, I feel love."

Nilling is a sequence of 6 loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading. Lisa Robertson applies an acute eye to the subject of reading and writing―two elemental forces that, she suggests, cannot be separated.
For Robertson, a book is an intimacy, and with keen and insightful language, Nilling’s essays build into a lively yet close conversation with Robertson’s “masters”: past writers, philosophers, and idealists who have guided her reading (and writing) practice to this point.
If "a reader is a beginner," then even regular readers of Robertson’s kind of deep thinking will delight in the infinite folding together of concepts―the codex, pornography, melancholy, cities―that on their own may seem banal, but in their twisting intertextuality, make for a scintillating study of reading as a deep engagement.

The Weather

by Lisa Robertson

Poetry. New work by the best-selling author of XECLOGUE and DEBBIE: AN EPIC. "Consider that we need to drink deeply from convention under faithfully lighthearted circumstances in order to integrate the weather, boredom utopic, with waking life. By 'integrate' we mean: to arc into a space without surface as if it were an inhabitable, flickering event. And by 'convention' we refer to our improprietous infiltration of the long citations of grooming, intimacy, and prognastication. Like flags or vanes, we signify an incommensurability. No elegance is self-sufficient. No-one is old enough to die or to love. The weather is a stretchy, elaborate, delicate trapeze, an abstract and intact conveyance to the genuine future which is also now. Mount its silky rope in ancient makeup and polished muscle to know the idea of tempo as real" - from the Introduction by Lisa Robertson.

Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture: Third Edition

by Lisa Robertson

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays – many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries – on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you’ll ever read.

Debbie: An Epic

by Lisa Robertson

Poetry. One of the more remarkable books of poetry to appear in a long time, Lisa Robertson's DEBBIE:AN EPIC was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. As arresting as the cover image, Robertson's strong, confident voice echoes a wide range of influences from Virgil to Edith Sitwell, yet remains unique and utterly unmistakable for that of any other writer. Brainy, witty, sensual, demonstrating a commanding grasp of language and rhetoric, DEBBIE:AN EPIC is nevertheless inviting and easy to read, even fun. Its eponymous heroine will annihilate your preconceptions about poetry - and about the name "Debbie."

The Men: A Lyric Book

by Lisa Robertson

The Men is a work that will be both familiar and fresh to anyone who has read Lisa Robertson. As a poet Robertson has received unrivaled praise for her uncompromising intelligence and style. The Men will not only compliment her previous work, but will add a new layer as a far more personal and lyrical book than anything she has yet published. Who are the men? The Men are a riddle. What do they want? Their troubles become lyric. The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Cavalcanti, Dante's works on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey―a subjectivity that honours all the ambivalence, doubt, and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance. It is this troubled texture of identification that she examines in The Men. How does a woman of the present century see herself, in men's lyric texts of the renaissance, in the tradition of the philosophy of the male subject, as well as in the men that surround her, obfuscating, dear, idiotic and gorgeous as they often seem? What if "she" wrote "his" poems? At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, The Men seeks to defamiliarize both who, and what men are.

Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

by Lisa Robertson

A New York Times Notable Book of 2010

Longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize

Verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias, 1995–2007. Collected by Elisa Sampedrin.

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. Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

Xeclogue

by Lisa Robertson

Poetry. Poetics. This book is a reprint of the popular 1993 Tsunami title by the author of DEBBIE: AN EPIC. Part manifesto, part dramatic dialogue, part epistolary prose, XEclogue jams the categories of Woman and Nature, inventing necessary fantasies of history and place. [Robertson] slams open the shutters of these poems ... This is young, fresh work, full of startling assertions ... She's a brave and eloquent composer. -- Billy Little, Boo Magazine. I want to tell you about the hegemony of my supple extensions. My pliant starlets float like symptoms. They float in the indicative case, flinging accusations, insults, blasphemies and curses. They're cerebral and illegal . . . (Ecologue Five, Phantasie . . . Four p.m.)

Cinema of the Present

by Lisa Robertson

What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating colour? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun ‘you’? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema? These and other questions are answered in the new long poem from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley + Maxwell. Praise for Lisa Robertson: 'Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields languageexpertly, even beautifully.' —The New York Times

Cinema of the Present

by Lisa Robertson

"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
What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating color? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun "you"? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture, and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema?
These and other questions are answered in the new collection from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley+Maxwell.
A quorum of crows will be your witness.
And if you discover you were bought?
You note the smell of rain, bread, and exhaust mixed with tiredness.
And if you yourself are incompatible with your view of the world?
And what is the subject but a stitching?
Once again you are the one who promotes artifice.
At 2 am on Friday, you burn with a maudlin premonition.
And rankings and rankings and badges and repetitions.
Lisa Robertson's book Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 and was longlisted for the 2011 Warwick Prize. Her other books include Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She is the 2014 Bain Swiggett Professor at Princeton University.

The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire.
One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.
Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.
"Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future."—Jennifer Krasinski,Bookforum
"It’s brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I’ve read before."—Rebecca Hussey,BOOKRIOT

3 Summers

by Lisa Robertson

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 10 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

Lisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

Riverwork

by Lisa Robertson

A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary life: from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris.

Some ruins are invisible.

Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, our narrator has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris's academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt's youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river's documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers - and laundries.

She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river's laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.

Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of aging and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.