Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic
Lisa Robertson. My friends, I didn’t even know who Lisa Robertson was when I pulled this off the 50-cent shelf at my local second-hand place (and neither did the bookstore owner—we spent quite a while at the counter while she tried to figure out which part of the cover is the author’s name, and which part is the title). You can bet I’m now looking to get my hands on more of her ouevre.
Look, here are some of my biases: I like that weird shit. I like stuff that makes you rethink, what are words? What do they do to our brains? Here is some of what Robertson does:
“Swathed in a spume of surprised light / and streaked with the spent and fluted / layers of doubt which are revolution’s / spate, the Nurses of Perfidy gently / descend to earth. They’re risks to the pre- / cision of pronouns. Pixilate trails / spell slogans in their wake. …”
And THEN she starts playing with font size, and THEN she starts overlapping text in various levels of greyscale, concluding this page (the pages are not numbered) with a little footnote:
“Feel free to accept this little scene as real.”
Debbie: who is she? She has a “lily-gold shirt,” a “stiff shirt.” She has “spurred ankles and purple knee-skin.” We meet nurses and amazons. “[T]he ordinary movements of words nurse my limits.” We meet a dog that kills two birds in a park. We meet the tropes of epic (the sea-spume, the poet Virgil, the (prophetic?) maidens. We’re taken on a hell of a trip. “I’ve fucked things up, but I’m awake.”
Debbie: An Epic was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award back in its day (1998). Not that awards nominations are the measure of a book’s value. If anything, this reflects well on the awards committee to have picked up on the brilliance of such a wild, veering, shifting chimera of a work. True confession: I picked it up and put it back several times before finally plunking down my 50 cents for it. It can be hard to judge something like this on the shelf. Trust me: worth more than your money — worth your time.
Publication details
Author: Lisa Robertson
Title: Debbie: An Epic
Publisher: New Star Books
Year: 1997