Herizons calls Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip 'completely virtuosic'
Excerpted from the multiple book review:
... it might be best to describe Lisa Robertson's writing as completely virtuosic. Her latest collection is Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, 'verses, essays, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias' from 1995 to 2007 as collected by Elisa Sampedrin. Robertson's fields of attention or inquiry are simultaneoulsy conceptual and corporeal. This is writing that's fully awake without being fully perspicuous or compliant; one might argue that it has a wake, that it pulls in tow issues of rights and property, being, singularity, sovereignty and the social, discourse, polity, assembly, convention, knowing. It's a hypnogogic vision that appreciates without acquiescing to a transparent politics of identity, while sustaining an insomniac vigour and precision with regard to language. All in all, it is pretty much impossible to resist the vitality, the audacious joy, wit and intelligence, of Roberton's ciphered thinking and language play. Here's a brief example from 'Lucite / (an amuse-gueule) / (because the present is not articulate)': 'Sit us on Lucite gently and we will tell you how knowledge came to us. // First the dull mud softened, resulting in putrefaction, lust and intelligence, pearl globs, jewelled stuff like ferrets, little theatres of mica, a purse containing all the evil smells of daily life.' Or this from 'Early Education:'
whatever the cause of the grace of dogs, the soft odour of books, the quibbling of kids, it's unbearable. no docent knows such grammar. nor am I parsed, me, a vain wreath of milk, vanity itself, caro factum, quia certiones, non spiritus ambulans and islands of written stuff, a vast itinerary of errors as I died upwards towards you, vita mea, like a magnet, sure, like girls die of fierce love and friezes commemorate the fierce cords of light that are their souls and soldiers eat sponge cake....
Reading Robertson makes you want to quote pages and pages, to read aloud, with glimpses of edgy understanding and assent, with both childlike and very adult delight in the internal rhymes of sound and bawdy, associative meaning.
