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A trilogy of neo-epic long poems from the cult-favourite author of Riverwork, now in a single volume.
XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic, and The Weather are Lisa Robertson’s first three books, published separately in the 1990s but written as a trilogy. These much-sought-after early works, together for the first time, are a glimpse into the foundations of an influential poet.
As a young poet, Robertson was interested in large, inappropriate, ostentatious literary gestures as a way to elude the stifling constraints of poetic tradition. These early books each mimic one of the three classical styles of Virgil, pastoral, epic, and didactic, letting feminist voices turn the ancient forms inside out.
The reworked neo-epics trouble the essentialist values of Nation, the gender binary, and heroic expansion, in favour of the politics of decolonized pleasure. What if the Roman citizen were a shepherdess, a cheerleader, a feminist videographer? What if they existed in a punk anthem, a parade, a catwalk show, a communal garden, a weather report? What would collective queer joy look like in a poem? And how do we deal with the traditions we loathe even as they speak through our psyches, our tongues?
With influences ranging from Vivenne Westwood to Judith Butler to Frank O’Hara to the BBC shipping reports, The Virgil Trilogy will delight dedicated Robertson fans and offer an essential introduction to new readers.
Praise for The Weather:
‘Hip, cerebral, streamlined, and dense, The Weather is about many things, including the poles of ecstasy and intellectualism …’ – The Stranger
‘Lisa Robertson knows where she is headed, but this is not the only reason that she is a trustworthy writer. Her work results from a reading practice in which words continue to disturb the poet, who is always just beginning to accept that there is more justice in literature than outside it.’ – n+1
‘[A] stunning and severely rich repatterning of the mind's generally uncharted terrain.’ – Publishers Weekly
‘A revelation…’ – Artforum
‘One of Canada's best poets ... Robertson's language is sparkling and sharp, and builds momentum through its rhythmic motion to produce a dense and difficult, but enjoyable and readable book ... The Weather rewrites the pastoral with confidence and cunning.’ – Prairie Fire
Praise for XEclogue:
‘Robertson is a poet of breathtaking originality.’ – Kevin Killian, The Stranger (Seattle)
‘This is young, fresh work, full of startling assertions … She’s a brave and eloquent composer.’ – Billy Little, Boo Magazine
Praise for Debbie: An Epic:
Shortlisted for the 1998 Governor General’s Award for Poetry in Canada
‘[Debbie: An Epic] is more than a poetry collection: it is part art book, part parody, and part manifesto. In the years since my first reading, I have come to think of Robertson’s work as demonstrative of what Lauren Berlant terms “genre flailing”: a gesture in writing to what is hybrid, incomplete, ongoing.’ – Jessie MacEachern, periodicities
Praise for Riverwork:
‘Robertson’s work is precisely about the negative space around authorship. Or, to state it otherwise, all that we might find when we renounce our attachment to that individual construct of genius.’ – Alex Tan, The Baffler
‘[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, The New York Times
‘Riverwork is a hymn to slowness and close reading, unknowability, imperfection, wobbly human labor, false starts, and angry love; it is a scream against the increasingly omnipresent, automatically generated offers to synopsize, or synthesize, and therefore to strangle. It opts for excess.’ – Claire Foster, Bookforum
‘To read Robertson is to witness a ventriloquism act ... Riverwork is no exception.’ – Emily Mernin, Literary Review of Canada
‘[F]ascinating … The author brings her poetic gift to this particularly nuanced look into her protagonist’s world and thoughts.’ – Library Journal
‘[A]n incantatory tale of water and dust, textiles and insomnia, the slipperiness of history, the shape-shifting of art and literature, the mysteries of dreams and memories, and the knottiness of time ... Robertson's mesmerizing portrait of a learned and reflective mind shimmers with striking perceptions, murmurs with loss, and whirls with ardor and moxie.’ – Donna Seaman, Booklist
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 Riverwork (2026), 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 Prize for Poetry. Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal (2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and German translations.