The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire. One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part...
"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 What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating color? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun «you»? Would the precise words of...
A New York Times 100 Notable Book and longlisted for the Warwick Writing Prize, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip collects occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turning vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.
