‘Raised from babydom into doubt, I’m as feminine as Rousseau. I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty: I didn't exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write.’ One morning, Hazel Brown wakes 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. Woven into her reminisces of Hazel's early life are episodes from Baudelaire’s youth, as well as reflections on the history of tailoring, the passion of reading and 19th century painting. Lisa Robertson’s debut novel is an exploration of life lived in pursuit of beauty, and a celebration of the mind of a girl.

Explores radical designs for the home in the nineteenth-century metropolis and the texts that shaped them Uncovers a series of innovative housing designs that emerged in response to London's rapid growth and expansion throughout the nineteenth century Brings together the writing of prominent authors such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing with understudied novels and essays to examine the lively literary engagement with new models of urban housing Focuses on the ways that these new homes provided material and creative space for thinking through the relationship between home and identity Identifies ways in which we might learn from the creative responses to the nineteenth-century housing crisis This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty. It examines visual and literary representations to explain how these innovations in housing forged opportunities for refashioning definitions of home and identity. Robertson offers readers a new blueprint for understanding the ways in which novels imaginatively and materially produce the city's built environment.

From the author of The Baudelaire Fractal, a poetry classic, with new work In 2004, boldly original poet Lisa Robertson published a chapbook, Rousseau's Boat, poems culled from years of notebooks that are, nevertheless, by no means autobiographical. In 2010, she expanded the work into a full-length book, R's Boat. During the pandemic, she was drawn back into decades of journals to shape Boat. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson's ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself. "Robertson has quietly but surely emerged as one of our most exciting and prolific philosophers-I mean poets. Interested in architecture, weather systems, fashion, autobiography, gender, the classics, and just about everything else, she manages to irradiate her subjects with calm, wit, and astonishing beauty. Robertson's style is both on splendid display and under fierce interrogation in her latest book, R's Boat." -Kenyon Review "In R's Boat, Robertson has penned a post-conceptual, post-lyric, relentlessly self-examining performance of memory and sincerity that manages, remarkably, to be both theoretically concerned and deeply emotive." -Harvard Review "R's Boat grapples with form, the constraint of language and tradition, and the challenge to avoid anything that might exist as template. The poems examine feminism, discourse, the body, and poetry itself through sumptuous, seductive language." -American Poets

Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson, the ambulatory Office for Soft Architecture. 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. There are also seven Walks, tours of Vancouver sites--poetic dioramas, really, and more material than cement could ever be. SOFT ARCHITECTURE exists at the crossroads of poetry, theory, urban geography and cultural criticism, some place where the quotidian and the metaphysical marry and invert. And it makes for one of the most intriguing books you'll ever read. Originally published by Clear Cut Press in 2004, this revised edition features a foreword and new material.