my new poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) is now available!

An acrobatic cascade of poem-letters that bring you right up close to the ordinary intimacies of life

edgeless is written as a collection of poetic sequences that illuminate the extraordinary ordinary, travelling across time and space as letters to family, friends, and contemporaries. From epistolary notes composed to his wife during her time at Banff, and a Covid-era call-and-response with Denver poet Julie Carr, to an elegy for his friend, the late Prince George poet Barry McKinnon, the poems in edgeless hop, skip, and jump through everyday intimacies and commentary. With mclennan’s usual flair and flourish for acrobatic, inventive language, edgeless writes the world from within, as his words leave you pressed right up against it.

Author of My Heresies, Alina Stefanescu, said, “The world is a vampire, according to the Smashing Pumpkins. But the world is also everything that is the case, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and – in this case—rob mclennan brings his own “edgeless” epistolary form to bear on one of the oldest traditions in poetics, namely, the directed address in the form of a letter. Somewhere between Edmond Jabès’ “Letter from Yukel to Sarah” in The Book of Margins and Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, one encounters mclennan’s “edgeless” letters to his wife, between time-space, Facetime, and twitter, the “gust of err” that waits and imagines the other. And the estuaries “for/with Julie Carr,” peopled by the winged concerns of Carr’s poems, attached to hope for life borne of poetry and friendship. We write to each other to imagine a future outside the given of capitalist realism. We write the other and the other writes us and the world we adore calls this “poetry.” The world calls this “a book.” The poet in me implores you to read it.”

edgeless (9781773861890) is published by Caitlin Press and distributed by the University of Toronto Press. It will be available to order from bookstores across Canada.

see the essay i wrote on the collection here : cover artwork by Aoife McLennan

The author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan has won the John Newlove Poetry Prize, been shortlisted multiple times for the Archibald Lampman Award, longlisted for the ReLit Award, longlisted for the Robin Blaser Poetry Contest via The Capilano Review, and longlisted twice for the CBC Poetry Prize. The editor/publisher of above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], he was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta for the 2007-2008 academic year, and is the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival. Born in Ottawa, rob mclennan is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair.