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 ccp 002Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson 288 pp. (with colour and b&w illustrations) isbn: 0-9723234-3-0 $12.95
Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture is a lyrical document of a decade or so of recent transformations in the city of Vancouver, B.C. Public fountains, pleasure-grounds, bridges, gardens, office towers, suburbs, shrubs, restaurants, and motion are among its subjects. The thirteen pieces of "occasional work" the Office has composed for numerous magazines, journals, and art catalogs include a celebratory ode to Value Village and a consideration of the decorative proclivities of Rubus Armeniacus, the Himalayan blackberry. The book also serves as a practical guide for the navigation and appreciation of contemporary cities. With an index assembled by Stacy Doris. "A pocket-size extravagance, a decoder ring, a gorgeous megadose of genius prose and apposite quotation. This book will make you smarter and more beautiful. We say, on almost every page and with utmost reverence, Holy shit." —Village Voice (Favorite Books of 2004) "The Office for Soft Architecture is a poet's fiction, a poet's dream—utopia, what used to be called a manifesto. Robertson's trope is exactly what we need to see whapping in the air, and, as the vastness of her international conceit reminds us, it is the air." —Eileen Myles, The Nation "Lisa Robertson not only puts forth a clever, confounding, detailed, and resonant theory of sensing and being in the world, but her writing style, at once gorgeous, flexing, decorated, febrile, special, insistent, and indulgent, successfully dislodges contemporary prose poetry from its well-ironed surreal-ish topos by a return to Decadent audacity and lushness." —Joyelle McSweeney, The Constant Critic
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