Riverwork
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Author: Lisa Robertson
Some ruins are invisible. Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. 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 Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of the great chroniclers of Parisian life, uncovering 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.LISA ROBERTSON is a Canadian poet, essayist, novelist, and professor living in Paris. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), two books of essays, and a novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General's Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. In 2017 She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2017, and in 2018 the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry.
ISBN 9781913512934. Peninsula Press. pb. 240 pages. 12.9 x 19.8 cm.
not yet published
Some ruins are invisible. Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. 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 Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of the great chroniclers of Parisian life, uncovering 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.LISA ROBERTSON is a Canadian poet, essayist, novelist, and professor living in Paris. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), two books of essays, and a novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General's Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. In 2017 She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2017, and in 2018 the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry.
ISBN 9781913512934. Peninsula Press. pb. 240 pages. 12.9 x 19.8 cm.
not yet published