Libby Leshgold Gallery

‘Robertson’s sensibility — an exuberant, saucy approach to the materiality of language and vice versa — is much more in step with [George] Clinton than long-dead ascetics ... The self-contained nature of Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip is just that good.’ – Eye Weekly

‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’ – The Village Voice


Please join READ Books and Coach House Books for the launch of Lisa Robertson’s brand-new title, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip.


Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip is edited by Elisa Sampedrin and is published by Coach House Books. Composed of previously uncollected verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments, and utopias from the past fifteen years, the book presents a window into the fierce intellect of one of today’s most daring authors.


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, written over the past fifteen years and collected by Elisa Sampedrin, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.


Canadian poet and essayist Lisa Robertson is currently artist-in-residence at California College of the Arts. Her books include XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. A frequent collaborator across genres and media, she is currently making a video with the Vancouver artist Allyson Clay and Nathalie Stephens and constructing new works in digital sound with poet Stacy Doris.

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