R's Boat

I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed in purple. Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from sentiment. Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my senses. The boldly original Canadian poet Lisa Robertson has received high praise for the uncompromising intelligence and style of her poetry. InR's Boat,she brings us to the crossroads of poetry, theory, the body, and cultural criticism, where the quotidian and the metaphysical marry and invert. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson's ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.R's Boatinterrogates subjective experience, philosophy, and closely observed phenomenon in lyric poems that are at once intimate and declamatory, slyly comic and poignant, classical and romantic. Praise for Lisa Robertson'sThe Men: "InThe Men, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture."-Village Voice "Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice. . . . Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia."-Boston Review