The latest episode of Momus: The Podcast features Lisa Robertson speaking about her newest publication, Riverwork (Coach House Books, 2026), in conversation with Lauren Wetmore. Robertson reads from the book and discusses writing as a process of refusal, questioning ideas of artistic “practice” in favor of fracture, explosion, and continual revision. Robertson and Wetmore also discuss late style, feminist labor, and poetry’s expansive relationship to the novel. The conversation was recorded in Brussels in front of a live audience at celador, a collective space founded in 2023 by a reading group of ten curators working on the intersection of visual art and writing.
Robertson’s influential body of work spans poetry and experimental prose. Her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Riverwork, Robertson’s much-anticipated follow-up novel, follows Lucy Frost (a writer, archivist, flaneuse, and domestic cleaner) as she takes up her disappeared great aunt’s research into the Bièvre, an ancient river under the streets of Paris. Riverwork flows through histories of industry, labor, water, and writing, propelled by Robertson’s extraordinary style.
Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.
