Riverwork

‘I was continually finding myself highlighting, flagging, gasping, reading passages aloud - literally engaging with the book, while also somehow devouring it. The ideas, the writing, the skill! This, I told myself, was Literature.’ - Mark Haber, Three Percent

‘If you already like any combination of Lisa Robertson or Chantal Akerman or François-René de Chateaubriand, you’re going to enjoy reading this book. If this is the first you’ve heard of any of the above, here is your chance to dip a toe into these waters that run so often unseen.’ - Dawn MacDonald, The Seaboard Review of Books

‘Robertson’s writing engages in a shrewd, at times caustic, examination of history and culture, and produces linkages between labour and capital, gender and class, and leisure and industry.’ - Jean Marc Ah-Sen, The Globe & Mail

‘Robertson’s work is precisely about the negative space around authorship. Or, to state it otherwise, all that we might find when we renounce our attachment to that individual construct of genius.’ - Alex Tan, The Baffler

’[A] collection of labyrinthine acrobatic lexical maneuvers delivered with the unadulterated confidence of the unhinged…This is an extremely specific strain of fun, but we are definitely having it.’ - Kerry Howley, The New York Times

‘Robertson is a ventriloquist of belatedness penetrating literary forebears and empathizing with underpaid laundresses in riverine sentences and reverie.’ - Michael Greenstein, The British Columbia Review

‘There are sentences in Riverwork that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. They are now sewn onto the lining of my feminism, my metaphysics, and my most inner vocabulary.’ - Audrey Wollen, Toronto Review

‘Riverwork is a hymn to slowness and close reading, unknowability, imperfection, wobbly human labor, false starts, and angry love; it is a scream against the increasingly omnipresent, automatically generated offers to synopsize, or synthesize, and therefore to strangle. It opts for excess.’ - Claire Foster, Bookforum

‘To read Robertson is to witness a ventriloquism act … Riverwork is no exception.’ - Emily Mernin, Literary Review of Canada

’[F]ascinating…The author brings her poetic gift to this particularly nuanced look into her protagonist’s world and thoughts.’ - Library Journal

’[A]n incantatory tale of water and dust, textiles and insomnia, the slipperiness of history, the shape-shifting of art and literature, the mysteries of dreams and memories, and the knottiness of time … Robertson’s mesmerizing portrait of a learned and reflective mind shimmers with striking perceptions, murmurs with loss, and whirls with ardor and moxie.’ - Donna Seaman, Booklist

‘Lisa Robertson is one of those writers who seems to invent a new genre with each book.’ - Marko Gluhaich, Frieze

’[I]n her latest novel, Riverwork, Lisa Robertson shifts attention to an arcane river that flowed through Paris until the beginning of the twentieth century: the Bièvre … Her novel is concerned both with histories that have been disappeared and with writing and reading as practices that daylight strata of labor, culture, and deep time.’ - Editor’s Choice, BOMB Magazine

‘Riverwork gives the sense of having been written hundreds of years ago while also anticipating the literature of the next century. The opportunity to sell a book like this is the reason I opened a bookstore.’ - James Crossley, Leviathan Bookstore

‘Riverwork is an alluvial novel, richly layered with textures of meaning, memory, and sentences that glimmer in the light.’ - Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

‘A deeply introspective and lyrical account of a woman’s search for her great aunt through her writings about the Bièvre river in Paris. She seeks to add to her lost aunt’s research of this lost river while also reading, writing, cleaning houses and wandering Paris in ways similar to many thinkers who have come before. Robertson weaves these Parisian ghosts - Proust, Baudelaire, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, etc. - in throughout the novel, creating the feeling of a shared discourse spanning centuries.’ - Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore

‘Inject this into my bleeding veins. Lisa Robertson’s follow-up to the underground (is it still subterranean? – am I hopeful that is? do I dare hope that it might not be?) classic, The Baudelaire Fractal, is nothing short of stunning. My most memorable reading, or at least remembered by me, are those works that mention or invoke, in secret or as shouts, other books. They have a way of exposing the genealogical trails, with all the resulting dead ends and diversions, that help compile a library worth its weight in words. Riverwork is as a modern examplar of such a work, and I will treasure it by following where it may yet lead.’ - Brad Johnson, East Bay Booksellers

Praise for The Baudelaire Fractal:

‘Robertson’s work offers a philosophical defence of the girl, a celebration of the menopausal dandy, a speculative release from the constraints of gender, and a portrait of reading as drifting.’ - Andrea Brady, London Review of Books

‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s already a classic.’ - Anne Boyer

‘A difficult work of ideas, by turns enlightening and arcane, part autobiographical narrative, part literary theory, Robertson’s debut novel, for those interested in possibilities of fiction, is not to be missed.’ - Publishers Weekly

‘Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future.’ - Bookforum

‘Things happen in the novel but none so much as the sentences themselves, they are the events; each sentence invites mediation, pause, excitement.’ - Allison Grimaldi-Donahue, BOMB Magazine

‘A new Lisa Robertson book is both a public event and a private kind of bacchanal.’ - Los Angeles Review of Books

Additional Praise for the Author:

‘Here as in six earlier glittering books, Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy … Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt … Though she wields … language expertly, even beautifully, she also shows an almost pagan delight in embodiment.’ - The New York Times on Magenta Soul Whip

‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’ - The Village Voice on Magenta Soul Whip

‘Lisa Robertson’s Boat works against the certainties much poetry strives to achieve.’ - Dan Beachy-Quick, Poetry Foundation

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver.

She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), and two books of essays, Nilling (2012) and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003). Her 2021 book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, an annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of wide rime, her ongoing study of medieval troubadour culture and poetics.

Robertson has been a visiting poet and professor at numerous institutions, including Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of East Anglia, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Piet Zwart Institute, Simon Fraser University, American University of Paris, Naropa, and California College of the Arts.

In 2017, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2018, the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry.

Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. A second novel, Riverwork, is forthcoming.

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