3 Summers

By (author): Lisa Robertson

A grappling with time, form and embodiment.

Recite your poem to your aunt.
I threw myself to the ground.
Where were you in the night?
In a school among the pines.
What was the meaning of the dream?

Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form’s time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body’s mortality, its thickness, its play. The ten poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems’ landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time – embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences – can tell.

‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy … Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt … She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’

—The New York Times

‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’

—The Village Voice

AUTHOR

Lisa Robertson

Lisa Robertson lives in the Vienne region of France. Her most recent books of poetry are Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, which was selected by the New York Times as one of the 100 best books of 2010, and R’s Boat, shortlisted for The Believer’s 2011 Poetry award. In 2006, Bookthug published The Men: a Lyric Book.

Reviews

‘Great poets create poems that teach you how to read them, and that is the case with Robertson.’

‘Readers seeking resolutely playful intellectual experiments will find in Robertson “the juiciness and joy of form.?*’

– Publishers Weekly


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Details

Dimensions:

96 Pages
7.84in * 8.91in * 0.48in
0.38lb

Published:

October 11, 2016

Publisher:

Coach House Books

ISBN:

9781552453308

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

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Language:

eng

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