Cinema of the Present by Lisa Robertson

A book-length lyric by the Canadian poet, Cinema of the Present (Coach House Books, 2014) follows a flaneur-ish “you” through the record of experience. The tone is alternately deadpan, searching, investigatory, and overwhelmed, as though Emily Dickinson were the detective in the adaptation of a Pynchon novel and paranoid about the lurking metaphors. Individual lines are both the characters in the eponymous film and the motifs in the score, and they enter and exit and return and leave again, occupying on- and off-screen space. You exercise the pleasure of refusal. I’m entirely for your fucked up way of living. You abandon it here. It’s a poem as a full-body tattoo—and like a tattoo, delightedly, defiantly immanent. —Ryan Smith