Riverwork
Will be published approx. on 5. May 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-1-55245-517-3 (ISBN)
Description
A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary life: from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris.
Some ruins are invisible.
Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bievre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris's academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt's youthful research on the Bievre, mining the river's documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers and laundries.
She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river's laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.
Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.
'[A] collection of labyrinthine acrobatic lexical maneuvers delivered with the unadulterated confidence of the unhinged...This is an extremely specific strain of fun, but we are definitely having it.' Kerry Howley, New York Times
'Robertson is a ventriloquist of belatedness penetrating literary forebears and empathizing with underpaid laundresses in riverine sentences and reverie.' Michael Greenstein, The British Columbia Review
'There are sentences in Riverwork that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. They are now sewn onto the lining of my feminism, my metaphysics, and my most inner vocabulary.' Audrey Wollen, Toronto Review
Some ruins are invisible.
Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bievre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris's academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt's youthful research on the Bievre, mining the river's documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers and laundries.
She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river's laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.
Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.
'[A] collection of labyrinthine acrobatic lexical maneuvers delivered with the unadulterated confidence of the unhinged...This is an extremely specific strain of fun, but we are definitely having it.' Kerry Howley, New York Times
'Robertson is a ventriloquist of belatedness penetrating literary forebears and empathizing with underpaid laundresses in riverine sentences and reverie.' Michael Greenstein, The British Columbia Review
'There are sentences in Riverwork that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. They are now sewn onto the lining of my feminism, my metaphysics, and my most inner vocabulary.' Audrey Wollen, Toronto Review
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Toronto
Canada
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 201 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
352 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-55245-517-3 (9781552455173)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.