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Riverwork by Lisa Robertson. Coach House Books. 240 pages. 2026.
Cities love their rivers. From Shakespeare’s Tiber “chafing with her shores” to Walt Whitman’s ode to the East River’s “scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide,” rivers have always been objects of awe, vigilance, fascination. Order and caprice coexist in them. They demarcate space, in their sinuous length, but threaten always to overspill their bounds. Dreams have thrived on rivers’ mystique: Think of the aged refugee Abu Qais fantasizing, in Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, of “all the things he had been deprived of” by exile, glittering on the other side of the Shatt al-Arab. “Something real” lies in wait there.
Unlike the living river, available to myth, the dead river paved over with asphalt is far less common and useful as a trope. But precisely from the smoothed-over ruin of one such forgotten river—the Bièvre in Paris—the Canadian-born writer Lisa Robertson stitches together a lost world. Riverwork, only her second novel after a lifetime of ludic, elliptical poetry, assigns itself an essentially recuperative and archival undertaking. Its unlikely heroine is the self-described “hag” Lucy Frost, descended from a line of petty thieves and “small-time scammers.” She works as a cleaner in the dusty apartments of a member of Paris’s professoriate, known only as the Archivist. Having unearthed the notebooks containing the hydrological research of her mysterious great-aunt Em—who herself vanished years ago, never to be found—Lucy sets out to retrace her ancestor’s errant footsteps.
