Kaleidoscope

Like a child watching a magic show, one opens a new book by Lisa Robertson with the delicious anticipation of being pleasantly deceived. So the news that the poet and essayist had published her first novel filled me with furtive excitement. The Baudelaire Fractal would be a novel, I figured, in the same way that Robertson’s 2001 poetry book, The Weather, was about weather: elliptically, with a nervous, fluid energy.

In that collection, the author describes her purpose as “to advance into / the sense of the weather, the lesson of / the weather.” What constitutes the sense of the weather? Take this passage from one of her extended prose poems:

The fresher breeze rustles the oak; our treachery is beautiful. Pop groups say love phonemes. We suddenly transform to the person. The hills fling down shadow; we fling down shadow. The horizon is awkward; we fling down shadow. The horizon melts away; this was the...