Lisa Robertson, Donato Mancini, derek beaulieu Reviewed at Canadian Literature

Eric Schmaltz reviews a trio of Canadian poesie for Canadian Literature, giving us great takes from Lisa Robertson's Cinema of the Present (Coach House Books 2014), Donato Mancini's Loitersack (New Star Books 2015), and derek beaulieu's Kern (Les Figues, 2014). "Collectively, these texts share an affinity for free linguistic play and textual subversion. However, in this review, I would like to map out the ways by which each of these authors so incisively identifies the pulse of the contemporary milieu and employs strategies to think about how and why literary artifice can assess and intervene into the contemporary moment," writes Schmaltz. Here's a small portion of such mapping:

Though a completed and published work, Loitersack is literally composed of a series of loitering fragments suspended in paratactic bliss. Loitersack, then, forces readers to reckon with the notion of the “finished” poem, and complicates the idea of the poem as a commodity.

Like Mancini’s "Introspective Data," Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present seems to draw influence—inadvertently or not—from the prevalence and power of the text-byte. Strategically employing its brevity, Robertson composes a 105-page long poem of non-sequiturs in two interrelated voices. Appropriate to the book’s invocation of the cinematic, Robertson’s language rotates like a shimmering, textual cylinder: passages move at an alarming speed, disappearing and reappearing on the page. In a lengthy dialogue, two voices exchange, repeat, return, and re-engage one another, continuing along the trajectory of Robertson’s poetic inquiry into issues of community, identity, and subjectivity, and how these ideas are inflected by information: “For you there is no information,” Robertson suggests in one voice, and later, in another, writes that “You are a theatre, not a machinery.”

Read more at Canadian Literature.