The Poetry Project

Lisa Robertson

Lisa Robertson stands outside, trees visible in the background but out of focus. She is looking at the camera, wearing green glasses, a dark blue coat, and dark blue turtleneck.
© Sina Queyras

Poet and art writer Lisa Robertson began publishing in the 90s in Vancouver. Her 13 books trouble the limits of genre—Debbie: An Epic, a feminist rereading of Virgil, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1997 and published in French translation in 2021; The Weather (2001), a long poem plundering the rhetoric of Romantic meteorology, now translated to French and Swedish; the ficto-essays Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) amplify the urban history of Vancouver; Nilling essays a phenomenology of reading (2012); the bildungsroman The Baudelaire Fractal, shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction; the recent Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, working with translation and annotation. She lives in France.