Lisa Robertson’s feminist poetics engage with the histories of sexualised domination, and indulge erotic pleasures while committing to ‘return to the sex of my thinking’. Robertson’s poetry seeks to free feminised subjects from the constraints of poetic patriarchy, embodied by Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch and Rousseau. Conflating Lucretius with the Story of O, she proposes a theory of reading as sensual pleasure and domination. But she explicitly rejects the imperial militancy of the Ovidian tradition, and inverts the gendered relations of domination and subjection associated with Petrarchanism in her book The Men. Her poems show how a feminised subject might resist the logic of domination and bondage that inheres in much classical erotic poetry through a ‘soft architecture’ – a term she borrows from Gottfried Semper. Robertson’s aesthetics of precarity (the shack, the blackberry) incorporates feminised embodiment into the patriarchal city (Rome) or the settler one (Vancouver). Through her art-historical and architectural interests in the fold, fashion and textiles, Robertson seeks to translate bondage into ornament, and release the lyric from the constraint of a singular ‘I’ into a more collective and transient impersonality.

Carr studies a diverse and intergenerational group of twenty-first-century feminist poets: Serena Chopra (US), Khadijah Queen (US), Aditi Machado (US/India), Lisa Robertson (Canada/France), and Nat Raha (UK), each of whom address patriarchal violence in their poems. While the articulation of the wounded woman’s body is a central project of contemporary feminism (as it has been of prior feminisms), as evidenced by the #MeToo movement, so too is the corresponding and equally dynamic celebration and display of women’s bodies as sources and sites of pleasure. In so far as patriarchy’s violence is often aimed at women’s bodies’ capacity for pleasure and desire, the expression of such pleasure becomes a form of resistance. Therefore, as much as the poems Carr reads air the wounds of patriarchy, they also explore the eroticthought of very broadly as that which draws us towards one another, as that which motivates the permeation of boundaries, and as that which emphasises the vulnerability of people in relationas a response to such wounds.