Canadian Literature calls Lisa Robertson 'one of our most crisply intelligent writers'

'Robertson is one of our most crisply intelligent writers, and the poems and prose pieces in Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (that possessive signaling one particularizing quality of this text), with their allusiveness (in all senses: history, philosophy, art criticism are but a few of the implied intertexts), continually knock readers off their conventional responses, asking that they follow the curlicues of thought-in-motion the writing displays ...

All the pieces, whether verse or prose, are essays in the old sense, attempts to make the process of thinking (with heart) visible, "lisible." Take "The Story," in which the narrating "I" attempts verb after verb, until:

And all the roads grew dark

with my longing and my tears. It snowed

in darkness. I strewed, I strove, I swelled all night.

The truck sheared through the Night.

Or any of the pieces: Lisa Robertson writes along a line between language that mocks meaning and facile conventions. Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip insists that language moves, with exquisite care, along that knife-edge, dangerous and cool, emotions banked but fiery beneath the text’s apparently calm and collected surface.'