The Men - Tapa blanda

"In The Men, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture." -Village Voice "Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice... Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia." -Boston Review

First published in Canada in 2006 *The Men* has gone on to sell thousands of copies, captivating readers with its wry yet passionate lyric of men. Lisa Robinson writes of men using the literary form they have developed to reveal themselves, with all of their spoken and unspoken agendas and justifications. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Cavalcanti, Dante's works on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey - a subjectivity that honours all the ambivalence, doubt, and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance. At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, *The Men* seeks to defamiliarise both who and what men are.