Join us for an evening as we celebrate the release of Boat by Lisa Robertson! Lisa will be in conversation with Derek McCormack. It promises to be a lively event that you won't want to miss.

For Lisa Robertson, the core pleasure of writing is her daily habit of composing longhand in a notebook, where fragments, lists, drafts, transcriptions, digressions, and descriptions share an improvised space. Boat is a long poem written over twenty years, in which she treats these gathered notebooks as an archive for a series of autobiographical queries. It takes the form of an accruing index of a lifetime, revisited each decade. Parts of the text have appeared in Rousseau's Boat (2004), and R's Boat (2010). Now two new sections have been added; like the earlier ones, each indexes one rereading of all the notebooks through the lens of a new keyword. The result is a slant imprint of a particular life.

Order Boat here.

Order Derek McCormack's latest book, Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death here.

Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and began to publish her work in a community of poets, artists and artist-run centres in Vancouver in the late 1980s. She works in the interstices of poetry and prose, the visual arts and the literary, philosophy and research, supporting herself as a freelance essayist, translator, and teacher. She has an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018 she received the inaugural C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York . Earlier books of poetry include Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, Cinema of The Present, and 3 Summers. Her essays are collected in Nilling and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for a GG in 2020. She lives in France.

Derek McCormack is a Canadian writer. His most recent novels are The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle Faggot, both published by Semiotext(e). Of Castle Faggot, Dennis Cooper said: "It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written."

MKG127 is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West between Dufferin St. and Gladstone Ave. on the south side. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday noon to 6pm or by appointment. To make an appointment email us at gallery@mkg127.com or call 647-435-7682.

We ask that visitors wear masks while in the gallery. The gallery's restroom is not open to the public. If you are feeling unwell, or are exhibiting any symptoms of Covid-19, please refrain from visiting the gallery. If you can no longer attend the event, please return your ticket so another attendee can take your spot. Thank you for your cooperation.

The launch will be live-streamed on our Facebook page.