Cleveland Review of Books, Jamie Tennant + Winnipeg Free Press,

American ex-pat poet Katie Ebbitt was good enough to interview me recently, newly up at the Cleveland Review of Books! That's pretty cool, I'd say. We talked about the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and of some of my activity through above/ground press. Jamie Tennant, master podcaster, had me on recently for a conversation around the new poetry book as well, now posted online. And Winnipeg poet melanie brannagan frederiksen reviewed the same poetry title over at Winnipeg Free Press as part of a group review, alongside new titles by Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi and Margo LaPierre as well! Thanks so much! You can catch her review at the link, or below, as she writes:

The latest collection from rob mclennan, The Book of Sentences (University of Calgary Press, 198 pages, $20), is rooted in his close attention both to the matter that makes quotidian life and to the semantic components of language. The COVID-19 pandemic, mclennan’s father’s death, the deaths of poets and friends and the emergence into a more fragile and fractured world are rendered in “The plain language of the earth. Our youngest monologues/ the long grass, anticipating mowers. In lockdown the world// is through this window.”

Among the things mclennan is both working out and honouring in the collection are the personal and intellectual losses and legacies. In Burning the dead grass, he uses the remembered “springtime ritual: layers of controlled burn” as an entry point to consider the settler relation to the land: “Monty Reid: No way to distinguish// what one has chosen to remember// from what one has chosen to forget. {…]/ {…] Lineages// the settler descendants do not reference.”

Overall, the book of sentences is a prolonged consideration of the intersection of writing, thinking and life. From the poems called Autobiography, one of which begins, “Neither a short walk nor a short talk. Once upon a time,” to Lecture, on craft, where “Not the first death./ The ways in which we/ swallow form. A crease// of each turned page,” mclennan brings together citation and observation with equal degrees of attentiveness.