Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture: Third Edition / Edition 2

by Lisa Robertson

Overview

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays – many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries – on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you’ll ever read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552452325
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	01/15/2011
Edition description:	Third Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	4.60(w) x 6.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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 (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam), 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. She has been a visiting poet and professor at Princeton University, University of Cambridge, U 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, and 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 from Coach House Books.

Editorial Reviews

The guide to the 13 works and seven "walks" of this little book (4 1/8" 5 7/8") is the "Office for Soft Architecture"-the alter ego of Canadian poet Robertson, author of Debbie: An Epic and The Weather. Seeking "the place in the polis of the sour heat and the pulse beneath our coats, the specific entry of our exhalations and words into the atmosphere," Robertson probes various fabrics, cities, rooms, people, histories and "the reaching middle," showing how life, in the way it uses space and time, is "soft architecture." Throughout, color and b&w photos and illustrations provide visual context for site-specific prose perambulations: a set of postcards of Vancouver sights graffiti-ed with spouting water lead to "The Fountain Transcript" ("Corporate fountains drooling goofily. Public fools."); photos of temporary scalable structures interspersed with Elspeth Pratt's sculptures situate "Doubt and the History of Scaffolding"; a suite of his Paris bedrooms introduces a walk through "Atget's Interiors"; "The Value Village Lyric" wears what appears to be the Office's own thrift-store wardrobe: "We think of the casual bravado of Baudelaire's tied black cravat against the scrim of white collar in the photograph by Nadar." The book brings to mind Lytle Shaw's Cable Factory 20 in its peculiar mix of weirdly enthusiastic investigative persona, cultural critique and historical sense, but develops a sensibility all its own, a "style of temporary hatred, nourished by each little loosened oyster we swallow, each acidic little kiss, each sweetmeat, each odour of saturation, each quirky, saline broth." (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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