"One of Canada's best poets ... Robertson's language is sparkling and sharp, and builds momentum through its rhythmic motion motion to produce a dense and difficult, but enjoyable and readable book ... The Weather rewrites the pastoral with confidence and cunning."
— Prairie Fire
"Hip, cerebral, streamlined, and dense, The Weather is about many things, including the poles of ecstasy and intellectualism..."
— The Stranger
"Lisa Robertson knows where she is headed, but this is not the only reason that she is a trustworthy writer. Her work results from a reading practice in which words continue to disturb the poet, who is always just beginning to accept that there is more justice in literature than outside it."
— n+1
[A] stunning and severely rich repatterning of the mind's generally uncharted terrain.
— Publishers Weekly
A revelation...
— Artforum
Light and air, greenery and earth take on unaccustomed qualities in the poet’s deft hand in this long poem from Lisa Robertson. Seven sections — "Sunday" to "Saturday," alternating prose and verse, repattern quotidian conversations and atmospheres: "bright and fresh," "brisk and west," "streaky and massed," January to December. A constellation of radical women is invoked to pass, elegiac, among clouds: Violette Leduc, Patty Hearst, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Shulamith Firestone, Ti–grace Atkinson. This is exhilarating poetry, wild and trouble, that seamlessly integrated lived experience with the play in mind. It is sure to entrance.

The Weather won the 2002 Relit Award for Poetry.

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist and novelist who lives in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), and two books of essays, Nilling (2012) and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003). Her 2021 book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam), an annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of wide rime, her ongoing study of medieval troubadour culture and poetics. She has been a visiting poet and professor at Princeton University, University of Cambridge, U East Anglia, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Piet Zwart Institute, Simon Fraser University, American University of Paris, Naropa, and California College of the Arts. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018 the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry. Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. A second novel, Riverwork, is forthcoming from Coach House Books.

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