ABBY PAIGE

All poetry is at some level about what words keep us from saying. It tries to leap the chasm between the world that is and the world that is effable. But what if the spaces between words and utterances are also speaking? In her new collection, R’s Boat, Lisa Robertson spreads her lines across the page, giving the work less coherence, but more breadth. The whiteness of her pages seems to suggest that silence has expressive potential. My review of R’s Boat is included on The Rover this week.