Winnipeg Free Press reviews Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House, 101 pages, $15), a selection of 'verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias' from 1995 to 2007, collected by Elisa Sampedrin, considers the painful multiplicity of artistic identity: 'I needed to make a living / So provoked astonishment.'

Robertson sings a linguistic bondage on the art of writing itself, an isolated and failing process where 'any correction is arbitrary / monstrous.'

Ideological hegemonies are met with imaginative verve. Conflicts of body and intellect, boredom and hunger, welt up in an ecstatic lyric that is incantatory, fragmented, meaningfully ornamental and always longing: 'a word's a precious vase to sip from.'

Unconventional in most every way, (beginning with the inclusion of the poet's name in the title, to the back cover title My Fidelity Is My Own Disaster), Magenta Soul Whip breaks linguistic bonds, resisting, improvising and reinventing a relationship with language and the world: 'In this way, I am not / Restricted.'