Labor, Archive, River and Dissent: Lisa Robertson in Conversation with Gillian Conoley

This Interview will be published in Pin Winter Issue 2026

Gillian Conoley: To begin at the beginning, a locus your writing finds most hospitable, I’d like to say how moved I was upon holding Riverwork for the first time, and finding the back cover’s comments from booksellers and bookstores: James Crossley of Leviathan Bookstore, Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books, Laurel Kane of White Whale Bookstore, Brad Johnson of East Bay Booksellers. I know that in your youth, you were also a bookseller. Your acknowledgement of the independent, endangered bookstores of our times also felt like a continuation, or a beginning, of the ethos of your second novel. I think of the laundress’s labor in Riverwork, and the Bièvre River as a site of labor for textile production. Could you tell us how the bookstore, where so much began for you as a writer, remains a life force in your writing and thinking?

Lisa Robertson: What you say about beginning is funny, because during the five years I spent writing and editing Riverwork it often seemed to me that what I was doing was looking for the beginning! It was quite distressing for me to not understand, year after year, how the book should begin. It was only a year ago—spring 25—that I suddenly saw how it should start: with a detailed itemization of the detritus that comprised Em’s archive, all the paper scraps and documents and junky bits. Which leads us to bookstores.

Yes, I owned a bookshop in Vancouver, for six years, beginning when I was 27. I had bought it, using my student loan as a down payment, from one of my professors at SFU—Ralph Maud, an Olson scholar. I kept the name he had given the shop, Proprioception Books. Ralph had conceived of the shop as a duplication of Charles Olson’s personal library. It had branched out from there, and when I began to volunteer in the shop—that was how it was staffed, with student volunteers—it was the main place in Western Canada, as tiny and hidden as it was, to go to buy contemporary poetry. We were “paid” in books. My first two acquisitions were Jargon Press’s editions of the collected Niedecker, and the collected Mina Loy. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

I had first worked at a bookshop at Shakespeare and Company in Paris around 1985. There too, I volunteered, as a way to have a place to sleep, which is how George Whitman ran the shop. Later he paid me for a while, but it didn’t last. But I did learn about Sylvia Beach, the shop’s founder, and I basically wanted to become her. When a couple years later I confessed this desire to Ralph Maud, he said I should take over his shop and so I did. I promptly moved the shop downtown, to a slightly less hidden place which shared a neighbourhood with used bookstores and artist-run galleries, and dropped out of my BA. I intended to be a bookseller for the rest of my life. That failed as a plan so I moved on to more lucrative waters—art criticism! It seemed sensible then. Financial planning has never been my strength.

So my early years as a bookseller taught me how to be one of the working poor, which has been an excellent skill for a freelance poet, art writer, and now novelist. In fact when young writers ask me for advice, the only thing I feel truly qualified to pass on is the absolute need for low overhead. I also built my personal library with books from my shop when I closed it. When the shop was open I didn’t take books home—I read them gently in the shop, so that I could sell them. Now, quite a lot of the books that still surround me are old Proprioception stock. Jargon Press, Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba, Leslie Scalapino’s O Books, the backbone of my philosophy library—Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Butler, Arendt, Kristin Ross, Barthes, Corbin, Grosz, Illich—I’m still rereading all of them. And speaking with my customers and my press reps in my shop replaced any number of degrees. The bookshop is a discursive jewelbox.

My sense of solidarity with independent booksellers is thorough, and is reflected also in my long relationship with Coach House Books, the small Toronto independent literary press I started with around 2006. I do think that this sort of work we’re collectively committed to is what keeps culture alive. Because we work independently but in a loose and rangy community, we can invent forms of survival and transmission with a great deal of agility. There’s no silo-ing, as in academic settings. We do this in spite of the dominant political economy and sometimes explicitly against it. What a joyous project to participate in.

GC: I love that you wanted to become Sylvia Beach. Your description of a newly forming community’s freedom and dexterity reminds me of the moment in Riverwork when Em leaves Toronto for 1928 Paris to discover her kin: those who desired “to evade their inherited destinies, and to find one another, to lose their bearings and to find new thought.” Sylvia Beach’s English bookshop, W.E.B. Du Bois’s magazine The Crisis, Artaud’s Bureau of Surrealist Research . . . you also bring forth the wanderers and strollers, Aragon, Benjamin. No “silo-ing” as you say, more of an outlier’s collectivity and revolt, where “Research could also be expressive, unquantifiable, emotional, wet.” Time reconfigures: the freedom found in Em’s Paris is one we can hope to emulate in our moment of economic scarcity and loss of dominant funding, our global systemic collapse. Paris in 1928’s ever-shifting atmospheric backdrop makes me think of the fluid way you work with characters in a 21st century novel.

In both Riverwork and The Baudelaire Fractal you have a main character close to you in authorship, she is almost a doppelgänger at times, though not quite, more like a painterly blur dashing between divergence and similarity if we think of caricature as a kind of portraiture. Within this blur of character and author, sensibility and intellectual pursuits are sometimes close. Hazel Brown in The Baudelaire Fractal (who upon waking thinks she has written all of Baudelaire) and Lucy Frost in Riverwork, also seem a bit related to one another in that they are characters who disrupt the canon. For example, Riverwork’s Lucy Frost was also the name of Charlotte Brontë’s narrator in Villette until Brontë’s very final revisions. This sense of doubling and relation to other literary characters and authors brings up questions about the fluidity of being in several regards. All at once I think of how both Baudelaire and Brontë’s works become newly alive, reactivated; no longer are these authors (nor the characters within their works) residing in finished, static texts. The canon dissolves as possibility enters. All is more alive and changing. I also think of an early phrase in Riverwork, “the pronoun I is a wandering experiment, not a point of identity.”  How is the sense of being, of selfhood, of existence explored in how you work with character?

LR: To be honest I don’t think at all about being, selfhood or existence. Well maybe existence a little. As in—how did I exist, how can one exist, how would she exist. Not existence as an ontological category, but as a social and economic problem, as a verb. I barely think in terms of character either. I’m interested in voice, style and tone, and their relationships. My characters are voice-led; the constitution of voice is a stylistic problem, and to the extent that there is success, it is carried by tone, which I think is a result of respecting rather than resolving the tensions inherent to stylistic problems. By style I mean something quite technical—syntax, diction, sentence structure, mood. Lucy is maudlin. The Archivist is barbed, domineering. Kémi is analytical. These qualities emerge from their language. Tone constitutes an attractive force field, linking them.

I’m not interested in representing my life per se. I make use of certain lived situations, settings and events very selectively, as items in an historical decor. At this point in my life—I’m 65—I have seen things that don’t exist any longer, things that have recently disappeared. I can put some of those things in a narrative structure, almost as a kind of museology, which has a certain use value, but the question of autobiography isn’t one I’ve taken on, nor do I wish to. I-saying is a way to synthetically hold drifting material together. I’m reading Proust’s early novel Jean Santeuil right now. It was written in the third person singular, a sort of omniscient narrative positioning. The book contains much of the same material as Remembrance. In fact, Remembrance leaves quite a lot out, things that are wonderful even. Proust’s move, between the two novels, from third to first person, is I think what let him filter the necessary from the extraneous, so he could go on to augment the necessary. Ironically the first person can function as a synthetic point of distance that permits certain textual constructions, concentrations and movements. The I of Riverwork gives a view over Em’s archive, over the absent river, over the plethora of research materials that contributed to the composition, over the problem of class in intellectual work. I like the first person for its synthetic suppleness.

I do enjoy names and naming very much. In my poetry too, going back to the 90s, names animate the language: Debbie, Lady M, Nancy. More recently, William of Aquitaine. Yes, Lucy Frost was named when I was rereading Villette as I was working on final edits on my book. Brontë had after all rejected the name. I thought I’d take her cast-off. My narrator had been nameless for all those years. It happened that my Lucy and her Lucy had certain similarities—intellectuals, domestic workers, immigrants, solitary women. It clicked, and I was happy. Hazel Brown’s name appeared, on the other hand, at the very beginning of my composition of The Baudelaire Fractal. Her name drove the narrative, whereas the river animates Riverwork.

GC: I fell in love with the river, its under-worldliness, its particular history of labor: the laundresses and their songs of 400 years, the tanneries, the Gobelins tapestry red scarlet dyes. I was especially intrigued at how you paced mentions and scenes of the river throughout the book, so that if it were gone too long as other activities or subjects occupied Lucy, such as the pesky Archivist, I would long for the river, so that by the time we get to your full research of the Bièvre, it is immensely satisfying and profound. I loved Lucy weeping at her inability to pierce, contain, and find all of the archive of the river. Her weeping was another river. When writing about the brothers Goncourt’s obscure novel about the Bièvre, Lucy writes, “I loved the pungent slurry of the water in their description; the riverwater itself became a debauched character.” I thought then of the socialist laundresses of the Paris Commune (1871) and how they took up arms to protect the river from the tanning polluters and also to keep their jobs. Their social position, just above or below prostitution. How strong they must have been both in body and psyche. Language: their loud talk and songs which must have meant that their labor, while hard and difficult was not without pleasure. This led me back to your description of Em’s riverwork: “a sprawling archive of female dissent.” I thought that phrase was an apt description of your work, in this book and others. Would you agree? Did you find any of their songs in your research? Does translating them appeal to you?

LR: Gillian, if you think my work could be characterized as a sprawling archive of female dissent then I’m forever beholden to you. This would constitute my ideal vision of my life’s work, absolutely. I’m thinking back to XEclogue, from 1993, where Lady M and Nancy frolic in bucolic shrubbery, flamboyantly evoking an erotic dream of sensual-intellectual girlhood, hijacking Virgil to this end. Or Debbie, of the epic, describing the descent of the Nurses of Perfidy from the split-open feminist sky. Or “Tuesday”, a prose poem in The Weather, which catalogues a stormy lineage of radical feminists, back to Olympe de Gouges and forward to Ti-Grace Atkinson. Even the Office for Soft Architecture is a covey of she-theorists. The lyric book The Men is practically a dissenter’s anthem. And so on.

I tried to find traces of the songs of the laundresses but I did not succeed. There truly was much to weep over. They are always described as raucously singing, by Hugo and others, with no apparent notation of the songs. When I read from this work in Nice last spring, at a small gallery there called the Niece Residency, a feminist bookseller from a local shop—I don’t recall her name—attended, and later sang a laundry song to me. Can you believe I do not recall the words either?

But. The history of women’s song as bawdy protest, especially when voiced collectively in public, does recur through my books, an implicit chorus. In The Baudelaire Fractal, there is the portrait of the red-haired streetsinger so idolized by Baudelaire and his friends, painted by Émile Deroy. I did quite a bit of background research on the streetsinger and her cohort, which would not all fit into the book. Manet also painted a streetsinger, in 1862. I learned that after the failed revolution of 1848 in Paris, streetsingers were required to be licensed by the city, and had to display metal licensing tags on their persons, rather like dogs. This was an act of police censorship, since singers were often the first diffusers of revolutionary news. Their songs were not just a little political, they were explicit forms of broadcast. They would sing on the Pont Neuf, which for centuries was the anarchist milieu of these women. Their songs, and next their presence, were outlawed over the course of the 19th century, during the same period when laundry workers were criminalized, and the Bièvre river was being covered and diverted to sewers.

In my ongoing work on troubadour poetry—this is the Wide Rime project, which I’ve been returning to since about 2012—I have been interested too in the medieval women singer-composers of poems, the trobairitz. Most of their work was censored by the Catholic Church, beginning with the 1209 crusade in their region of western France, and the two-century long inquisition that followed. The body of trobairitz work that remains to us is very fragmentary and scant. sabrina soyer and I have translated and glossed the remaining four poems of one of those women, named Na Castelloza, and our book has just been published under the title I of Song, by Nion Editions. We found that the women of Occitanie wrote songs of complaint, of judgement, of ridicule, or of refusal. They never sang benignly of birds and nature. One of the recurrent words in their songs is “No”. It’s important to point this out because the words yes and no were new in the language then—they did not exist in Latin, and came into use only as the Romance languages diversified after the fall of Rome. So the trobairitz were naysingers, and their naysongs were destroyed by the church as the European continent methodically excised its heretical elements.

GC: “No” is the best word. That the trobairitz were using it so frequently just as it came into the Occitan language is fascinating, a word born of necessity, and a testimony to the strength of “no,” how it arrived just in time for the trobairitz. It’s the most frequent word used by 1-to-2-year-old children as they claim their independence. No to everything. No to that is not my cake I won in the cake walk, No. There is a strong sense of pleasure in the naysaying trobairitz songs, which reminds me that I would love to talk about pleasure with you, the sensation of pleasure in your work, which is quite strong. My sense is that some of this pleasure is similar perhaps to the pleasure of reading for you? There is a transference of pleasure that happens with writers who have this ability: the writer’s pleasure is their reader’s pleasure. I think of Lyn Hejinian who you mention earlier when you had her press Tuumba’s works in the Proprioception bookshop and no doubt many of Lyn’s books. And of course Stein. And Baudelaire and his many thoughts on pleasure. I think of how in The Baudelaire Fractal you have his coat (which Hazel wears) dissolve into nothingness: while it’s a gesture of destruction of male literary canonization, as an image and an idea, it is also very gorgeous and pleasurable. So many writers of pleasure appear in Riverwork: Proust, Rousseau (who appears in several of your books), and of late, Genet. I think of Genet’s description of lice covering him and his clothing in The Thief’s Journal, and rather than an image of repulsion, in Genet, it is beautiful, pleasurable. Can you talk a bit about pleasure and how you experience it as a writer and a reader?

LR: What’s the word for the scent that rises from old dictionaries just opened after a long dormant pause, in the wake of an electrical storm, a fig tree entangled with a hazelnut tree breathing outside the open study door? With crow, dove, robin and tractor? Pleasure’s diversity is inherent to mortal life; reading is just one part. For me, yes, a big part, and since I was a very young child. It’s hard to say why, since reading wasn’t part of my family culture. It was a solitary pursuit, so accrued the cachet of secret things that must be hidden. Early on I learned how to protect this drive—I say drive, not habit, because it was desiring and mobile, very undiscerning. Once I did find an intellectual milieu, in my later 20s, I also learned how to dissemble. The concept of pleasure was not relevant to critique in some leftist worlds, so it seemed. Discovering, in the late 80s and early 90s, the feminist film discourse of Teresa de Lauretis and Laura Mulvey, especially Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, alongside Judith Butler’s work on self-fashioning, and the gendering of materiality (I’m thinking here of Bodies that Matter), gave me a counterposition for the defense and diversification of pleasure as integral to feminist practice. That was the moment when reading became the writing I wanted to be doing. I haven’t looked back. Pleasure is a survival, a learning to live. It’s integral to resistance. The imperative is to tend it.

How does that work? I think pleasure moves across and recombines sensual supports, from ear to eye to touch to scent and more. By means of this errant, even vagrant, recombinatory moving-across, consciousness constructs and reconstructs itself, not as a fixed image, but as an ongoing aesthetic work of the sensual imagination. We have in Didier Anzieu’s book, The Skin Ego, an analysis of the healing interchangeabilities of the representational membranes that bind together meaning, culture and subject—paper, skin, cloth, celluloid, the enrobing sound of the voice. And we have in the baroque thinkers, like Deleuze, Leibniz, Burton, Corbin, Adnan, the description of the continuous irregular movements that enfold human sensibility with diverse environments and elements—geological, humoural, textile, luminous, vegetal, cosmic—inviting material becoming into the experience of mortality and community. They incite us to feel the world as a gathering erotic force that works across supports—vocal, intellectual, dreamt, inscribed. Reading temporarily and contingently displaces this mind-blowing propensity of baroque co-invention to the scale of the individual psyche in its historical matrix and moment. How could I not read? It makes me cry just to think of it.

GC: Speaking of interchangeability, of co-invention, of emulsive sensual forces, let’s talk about the cinematic and the singularity and distinctiveness an image can hold upon your reader. Even though, as you say, style, syntax, tone, language and voice are more foregrounded in your work, an image is, on occasion, given room and precedence. I don’t think we could call you an “imagistic” writer, though you do give us an image now and again in both Riverwork and The Baudelaire Fractal that is rare, powerful, impeccably placed.

Your Lucy Frost tells us, “All water is imprinted by communicating vibrations, which persist and transmit, beneath perception.” She reminds us: “Lucretius says that images are fine films of likeness given off from the surfaces of beings and things, into air.” And that “This is how the soul, the repository of inner sensing, is always being made from images, absorbing the filmy irreality from that air and the water. The space between the material and immaterial dissolves.”

The images that have most stayed with me from Riverwork are two: one is of the smocked Lucy Frost in the Archivist’s home, so intently, expertly cleaning with great pleasure and exactitude as “housework” is reclaimed as an art, not a labor carried out in drudgery but as a passion, even an eroticism. The other image always with me is the strong bent back of the laundress climbing over the shore of the Bièvre, laundry in one hand, in her other, the hand of her young son as she pulls him along into the work. He is recalcitrant, she is heartily stepping into labor. For me the sensation is almost like seeing a photograph or a still in cinema.

As your reader, I do not “observe” these images I mention above, I see them as if I were in the same room or ground: Baudelaire’s dissolving coat I mentioned before, and these two from Riverwork that continue to haunt. I’m also thinking a bit of your poetry, and your collection Cinema of the Present.

It seems as though these images break through the active, delicious surface of your prose, they pierce and haunt. Can you speak about how the presence of the filmic or the visual is allowed to surface through the fabric of your writing where so much interchangeability is happening in the cross-current membranes you create, binding “together meaning, culture, and subject”? I know this is a tall order, perhaps an unanswerable question, but I’d love to know your thoughts.

LR: I think I’ll move into this vast question by tentatively asserting that in my thinking, the image is not necessarily or predominantly visual, or retinal. I’m indelibly shaped by the Baroque thinkers, and one of them, Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (a key text for Djuna Barnes, by the way) explains that the imagination is the part of the soul where the data of sensual memory recombines to synthesize new realities. These sense impressions are not only visual—they pertain to the work of all of the senses, which also intermingle in the course of the soul’s internal work. But to make this claim, which does feel vital to me—after all a refrain in Riverwork, coming through the nurse Kémi, is that, as Marx says, the senses and their divisions and names are a work of human history: new senses could still be formed—is not to erase the presence of film in my novel. I think that cinema also works in the domain of the not-yet-sensed, the about-to-be-sensed, and also with the strange tension between the siblings, sight and sound. Eisenstein said as much in his montage theory, where he talked about montage making a third reality, hovering between two montaged images. Burroughs also—he spoke of cut-up technique in terms of “third mind”. Cinema, and the image, are vibrational, not fixed or substantial. I’m also thinking of Pedro Costa’s film on Straub and Huillet’s editing practice, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? Their big problem, at the cutting table, is how to suggest the passage of a smile on an actor’s face, a smile that crucially changes the meaning of his spoken words. But to their dismay the smile was not filmed, although they both recall having witnessed it on set. So they have to devise an edit which suggests the presence of a smile which was not in fact filmed. It’s in the image without being visible. Aby Warburg also broached the problematically unstable status of the image in his Mnemosyne Atlas. For him the moving image in history had an electrical charge, a serpentine mobility. Resurgent, it had the ability to change meanings when it appeared in new settings. But if you accept the fundamental mobility of the aesthetic image across sense categories and histories, how do you, in practice, in composition, intimate this vibrational complexity, and complicity? There’s the problem, and it was a big one for me as the manuscript accrued. As Eisenstein’s montage theory, Pedro Costa’s documentary, and Burroughs’s cut-up suggest, one way is to work very closely with the aleatory relationship between fragments. The non-resolution of fragments is now a known technique in poetry practice, and I certainly gave myself that liberty while writing Riverwork, which is, at a certain level, a novel-as-poem.

My two core images—the river, and the great aunt—are both absent. They are in the narrative as absence only. The narrator has no visual impression of either river or aunt. Neither will ever reappear. The novel can’t do that. I began writing this book with the great need to bring these irreconcilable images into relationship, to explore their psychic valence. It was intuitive, and non-negotiable, and became the problem that drove the book. I began with the river. After walking the bed of the old Bièvre in Paris, which honestly was boring, since the neighbourhood was very successfully sanitized, and looking at some documentary photographs, by Atget and others, I was left without any compelling grasp. I decided to follow descriptions of the river in literature, which led me to read Manette Salomon, a novel by the Goncourt Brothers set on the Bièvre in Paris, Hugo’s Les Misérables, Rabelais, Huysmans, and various Baroque and Romantic social historians, in pursuit of an image of the river. My impression after reading all those contemporary accounts was mostly olfactory! It was a river that stank. That was the image after all—olfactory, before optical. Also, it flooded, raging flash floods that killed many people and animals every few years. So there was the sense of unbridled, destructive, elemental movement as an image, a powerful kinetics. Then, colour. The dyeing, its history, the darkly polluted waters. So my river image was fluctuating erratically across sensual supports. As for the aunt, my way of building an image for her was very belated, which slowed down my work. Only six months before final edits, after several years of frustration, I realized that Em was present metonymically, by means of her archive. That to describe her archive was to intimate her body. Only at this point did she come to exist as an active image, to glimmer through the montage. I feel like I was very slow to come to these displaced realizations, both of them absolutely core to the book, but if I did arrive at them, the reeking, writhing water, the papery, janky detritus of Em, I was helped by my experience as a film viewer, and the understanding that the image is dependent on the material respect for absence. Another film that influenced me enormously was Blind Spot, a 1981 film by the German feminist Claudia von Alemann. It narrates the search by a young female historian, in present day Lyon, for the traces of Flora Tristan, a French socialist writer and organizer who had worked with the silk weavers there in the 1840s. Elizabeth, the historian, can find no traces of her subject, so she has to invent a new way of doing historical research. She makes sound recordings on cassette-tape at sites in old Lyon where Tristan would have passed. She listens to the city. The film’s soundtrack recomposes the phantom passage of Flora Tristan. I learned that the image is a ghost. It’s spectral, spiritual, displaced. This realization flooded across into the composing of Riverwork. Much of the work is immaterial, unchartable. Work on this book showed me a way to attend to unresolved absence, not to solve it, not to atone for it, not even to critique it, but to recognize the creative force and inchoate presence of the erased in city and psyche.

Works Cited

Anzieu, Didier. The Skin Ego. Translated by Chris Turner, Yale University Press, 1989.

Blind Spot [Die Reise nach Lyon]. Directed by Claudia von Alemann, 1981.

Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Smith, Elder and Co., 1853.

Burroughs, William S., and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind. Viking Press, 1978.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1621.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993.

Castelloza, Na. I of Song. Translated by Lisa Robertson and sabrina soyer, Nion Editions, 2026.

Deroy, Émile. La petite mendiante rousse. 1843, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949.

Genet, Jean. The Thief’s Journal. Translated by Bernard Frechtman, Grove Press, 1964.

Goncourt, Edmond de, and Jules de Goncourt. Manette Salomon. Gallimard, Folio classique.

Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. 1862.

Loy, Mina. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Edited by Roger L. Conover, Jargon Society, 1982.

Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse, revised by Martin Ferguson Smith, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1992.

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.

Niedecker, Lorine. From This Condensery: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker. Edited by Robert J. Bertholf, Jargon Society, 1985.

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Penguin, 1983.

———. Jean Santeuil. Translated by Gerard Hopkins, Penguin.

Robertson, Lisa. Anemones: A Simone Weil Project. If I Can’t Dance, 2021.

———. The Baudelaire Fractal. Coach House Books, 2020.

———. Boat. Coach House Books, 2022.

———. Cinema of the Present. Coach House Books, 2014.

———. Debbie: An Epic. New Star Books, 1997.

———. The Men: A Lyric Book. BookThug, 2006.

———. Nilling: Prose. BookThug, 2012.

———. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Clear Cut Press, 2003.

———. Riverwork. Coach House Books, 2026.

———. The Weather. New Star Books, 2001.

———. XEclogue. Tsunami Editions, 1993.

Warburg, Aby. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original. Edited by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, Hatje Cantz, 2020.

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? [Où gît votre sourire enfoui?]. Directed by Pedro Costa, 2001.

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 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 just out from Coach House Books.

Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. The author of ten collections of poetry, including Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat, 2023) and A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2019), Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Tulane, and Sonoma State University. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is editor of VOLT magazine. Her translation of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights. Conoley has collaborated with installation artist Jenny Holzer, composer Jamie Leigh Sampson, and Butoh dancer Judith Kajiwara.