Lisa Robertson and Shanzhai Lyric at Parquette, Montréal

Name: Lisa Robertson and Shanzhai Lyric at Parquette, Montréal
Start: 2026-05-29T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-05-29T21:00:00-04:00
Location: Parquette, 1345 Rue de Bellechasse, Montréal, QC H2G 1N8, Canada

Schedule

Fri May 29 2026 at 07:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Parquette, 1345 Rue de Bellechasse, Montréal, QC H2G 1N8, Canada | Montreal, QC

Lisa Robertson + Shanzhai Lyric
Book Launch and Runway Reading
Riverwork
by Lisa Robertson
Endless Garment
by Shanzhai Lyric
29 May 2026
7pm
Parquette
1345 Rue de Bellechasse, Montréal
Hosted by Michael Nardone
+
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 Collegeof 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 HouseBooks.
Shanzhai Lyric is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Through an ever-growing archive of poetry-garments, Shanzhai Lyric explores the potential of mis-translation and nonsense as utopian world-making (breaking) and has previously taken the form of poetry-lecture, essay, and installation.
https://shanzhailyric.info/