The New York Times loves Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

Here as in six earlier glittering books, Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. Homes and architecture, girlishness, feminism and womanhood, the idea of the future and the sense of the past mingle and collide in poems called 'essays' and in essays that read like poems: one essay called 'First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant' imagines 'a perishable structure of comportment shaped by the synesthesia of eating'; the restaurant, she adds, 'begins where Utopia ends.' Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt, asking, 'What will you do with your legs and your heart?' Ancient sources and jarring contemporary terms evoke for her 'the pure sexual curves / Of utopia, the rotation / Of its shadows against the blundering / In civitas.' A Canadian who has also lived in California and France, Robertson seems equally alert (and equally alienated) in Vancouver, in Rome, in her fictional 'Roman Vancouver' and in the placeless, abstract realms of European philosophy: 'It is as if / History dilates the body, to pertain / To the audacity of some moral / Oblation.' Though she wields such forbidding language expertly, even beautifully, she also shows an almost pagan delight in embodiment. Robertson adapts quotations from Lucretius, St. Augustine and other ancient authors, but also composes sharp words on her own early life: “'Who possesses the stamina to parent their own sensibility? no brat does. . . . a kid’s weaned on eternal promises and humiliation.' It is not the only moment when the curtains of experimental style part to reveal a clear, durable truth.