Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture: Third Edition - Softcover

Robertson, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552452328 ISBN 13: 9781552452325

Publisher: Coach House Books, 2011

Synopsis

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. 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. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you’ll ever read.

About this title

About the Author:

Lisa Robertson's books of poetry include XECLOGUE, DEBBIE: AN EPIC (nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1998), THE WEATHER (winner of the Relit Award for Poetry in 2002), THE MEN and LISA ROBERTSON'S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP. University of California Press published Rousseau's Boat in Spring 2010. She is currently writer in residence at Simon Fraser University.

From Publishers Weekly:

The guide to the 13 works and seven "walks" of this little book (4 1/8"×5 7/8") is the "Office for Soft Architecture"-the alter ego of Canadian poet Robertson, author of Debbie: An Epic and The Weather. Seeking "the place in the polis of the sour heat and the pulse beneath our coats, the specific entry of our exhalations and words into the atmosphere," Robertson probes various fabrics, cities, rooms, people, histories and "the reaching middle," showing how life, in the way it uses space and time, is "soft architecture." Throughout, color and b&w photos and illustrations provide visual context for site-specific prose perambulations: a set of postcards of Vancouver sights graffiti-ed with spouting water lead to "The Fountain Transcript" ("Corporate fountains drooling goofily. Public fools."); photos of temporary scalable structures interspersed with Elspeth Pratt's sculptures situate "Doubt and the History of Scaffolding"; a suite of his Paris bedrooms introduces a walk through "Atget's Interiors"; "The Value Village Lyric" wears what appears to be the Office's own thrift-store wardrobe: "We think of the casual bravado of Baudelaire's tied black cravat against the scrim of white collar in the photograph by Nadar." The book brings to mind Lytle Shaw's Cable Factory 20 in its peculiar mix of weirdly enthusiastic investigative persona, cultural critique and historical sense, but develops a sensibility all its own, a "style of temporary hatred, nourished by each little loosened oyster we swallow, each acidic little kiss, each sweetmeat, each odour of saturation, each quirky, saline broth."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1552452328
• ISBN 13: 9781552452325
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 240