two new chapbooks and a book-length essay : Broke Press, Subpress collective + Spuyten Duyvil,

Okay, so I know you already know I had a poetry book out a couple of weeks back, but did you know Spuyten Duyvil just published a book-length essay as well? A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, a work I composed while working the call-and-response collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr. My half of our collaboration, of course, landed in my most recent poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) [see my short essay on such here], which is very much available, just as her side landed in UNDERSCORE (Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here]. And the artworks for both titles were done by my youngest daughter, Aoife! 

There are also two new chapbooks: Small studies in blue (BC: Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (NJ: Subpress Collective, 2026). The first title is a handful of poems excerpted from "Autobiography," the third in my "smaller" trilogy--the book of smaller (2022) [see my short essay on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my short essay on such here]--the full-length of which is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press at some point. The selected is taken from my 1990s-era published work, as selected by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, who also plans to release two more volumes of my work over the next year or two? Gadzooks!

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.

above/ground press (and myself!) at Banff! , with six new titles + an online reading,

In case you hadn't heard, above/ground press (and myself) are in the midst of a week at Banff, wandering through the writing studios as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program at the University of Alberta! See the interviews I conducted with twenty-seven prior writers-in-residence back in 2016, as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration, as well. and of course, there are six new above/ground press chapbook titles to accompany this new anniversary:

METAL OF THE FUTURE, ryan fitzpatrick $6 ; shore thing, J. R. Carpenter $6 ; So Now, Daphne Marlatt $6 ; Shanzai, Fred Wah $6 ; from the green notebook : , a writing vigil, rob mclennan $6 ; Sparky and Squire, Derek Beaulieu $6

See the prior cluster of new above/ground press titles here;

There will also be an online (and in person, if you are nearby) reading as part of the week! Register here.

May 15, 2026 7-10pm MDT
Clvb 33, St. Julien Way, Banff AB and online

With readings from Thomas Wharton, Fred Wah, ryan fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, JR Carpenter, rob mclennan, Daphne Marlatt, Jana Pruden, Hiromi Goto, and Marilyn Dumont.

new poems, a chapbook and prompt and a short story,

An update, to keep you in the loop (of course): I've poems from the manuscript "Fair bodies of unseen prose" over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (as part of a folio of Ottawa poets) and delicate emissions zine; a poem from my "dream logic" manuscript sits as a prompt via Benjamin Niespodziany's Sunday poem and prompt substack, and there was even a chapbook from that particular work-in-progress recently through above/ground press; and I've a short story up at The Temz Review. I get quoted in this article over at Apartment613 about this week's VERSeFest. And apparently my spring poetry title with Caitlin is anticipated by the CBC! So, that's cool.

Ottawa book launch : the book of sentences, (with Stephanie Bolster + Zane Koss,

the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025): now available / order through your favourite bookstore or, in Canada, through the press directly; elsewhere, order through bookshop.org / if you are an above/ground press subscriber, simply toss me $20 and I'll add a copy to your next delivery / Ottawa launch: October 18 via Plan 99 Reading Series, 5pm, at The Manx Pub w/ Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster (new Palimpsest Press poetry title) + Guelph poet Zane Koss (recent Invisible Publishing poetry title) / myself, new poetry title and above/ground press will also be at: 2025 Toronto International Festival of Authors Small Press Market, November 1st + Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market, November 2nd (Toronto) / the ottawa small press book fair, November 22, 2025 / and can you believe the book has already had a review? / be sure to check out the essay I wrote on the collection over at my substack,

snow day (new book!) + reading soon in Vancouver w Christine,

I’ve a new poetry book this month! My third title with American publisher Spuyten Duyvil, Snow day (2025)—following How the alphabet was made (2018) and Life sentence, (2019)—is now available to order! A collection built out of a sequence of sequences, it includes the title poem, “Snow day” (produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2018), and “Somewhere in-between / cloud” (also produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2019), was composed for and published as part of Dusie Kollektiv 9: “Somewhere in the Cloud and Inbetween”—A Tribute to Marthe Reed (1958-2018) as an unofficial/official element of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, April 18-21, 2019. Much thanks to Susana Gardner for her ongoing support. This poem, in places, utilizes the occasional word and phrase from the late Marthe Reed (as well as a fragment quoted from Timothy Morton), including from her co-editor afterward, “‘Somewhere Inbetween’ : Speaking-Through Contiguity” from Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018).

The poem “What they write in the snow” was included in the first issue of Julian Day’s +doc: a journal of longer poems (Winnipeg MB: null pointer press, summer 2021). “for my fifty-first year,” appeared as the great silence of the poetic line through Derek Beaulieu’s № Press (Banff AB) in an edition of fifty copies, July 26, 2024. Thanks much to all the editors/publishers involved, and the whole team over at Spuyten Duyvil! Now, of course, we get to work on the final copy/proofs for another title with the same publisher, my forty-page essay, A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr (2025); stay tuned!

Hopefully I’ll even have copies of Snow day on-hand soon, including for the reading Christine and I are doing later this month in Vancouver. You are coming out to hear us, yes?

Poetry in Canada: Off the Shelf Reading Series Part 5
Featuring: CHRISTINE MCNAIR + rob mclennan

February 28, 2025
Doors: 6:30 pm /  Event: 7 pm
SFU Belzberg Library
SFU Harbour Centre, 515 Hastings St. Vancouver BC

https://www.poetrycanada.org/

I'm also reading to launch the new book in Ottawa soon, the day after my birthday, with Jorge Etcheverry Arcaya, Rob Manery, Grant Wilkins + Chris Turnbull, so if you're around, that would be good to see you. Oh, and here are the blurbs on the back cover. Brilliant thanks to all three for their generous words:

There is snow and the school buses are cancelled. Letters come from afar in spite of the weather. In Snow Day, rob mclennan documents the detritus of living – the snow, the children, their toys, their resistance to naps, the accumulation of small daily events that make up this specific life. Except for what filters faintly through the media, there are no bombs, no daily fights for food or shelter. Even so, mortality is the quiet accompaniment rumbling beneath this work. We live on and find connection in spite of death. “How do [people] get strength to put their clothes on in the morning?” notes rob, quoting Emily Dickinson. By observing the private moments, specific to his world but common to many, he finds some kind of answer and some kind of grace.
            Samuel Ace, author of I want to start by saying (CSU Poetry Center, 2024)

In Snow Day, rob mclennan squints through the hazy weather of everyday life to wonder what value a writing life might offer. As time passes from his desk, his couch, his car, his books, his screens, mclennan looks forward and back in time, his continued commitment to the process-based long poem working its way through a midwinter day boiled over into weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. These poems show us how the smallest gestures can open onto wider fields of connection, bringing things into contact even when they feel distant.
             ryan fitzpatrick, author of No Depression in Heaven (Talonbooks, 2025)
                         and Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023)

In Snow Day, rob mclennan offers a quiet sibling to Bernadette Mayer’s beloved Midwinter Day, a personal reverie to revisit each year as the world darkens. Part history, part elegy, Snow Day weaves together an international poetry community, reflecting mclennan’s long-term commitment to spinning and repairing that creative web.
            Jessica Smith, author of How to Know the Flowers (Veliz Books, 2019)

OTTAWA BOOK LAUNCH: rob mclennan’s On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press) : Sept 25, 2024 :

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 : 7pm (opens at 6pm if you want to have dinner first,
The Royal Oak, 1 Beechwood Avenue (upstairs), Ottawa
lovingly hosted by Rhonda Douglas,

a Q&A with the author will follow a reading from the collection; copies of the book (as well as copies of prior works) will be available (cash or e-transfer); or order direct through the publisher

“rob mclennan’s On Beauty is an astonishing work of literary panache, a collection of brief, elliptical stories that make a virtue of their brevity, terse words carved out of the white space of the page, glowing with wit, startling juxtaposition, crashing sadness, and sly comedy. For each story there is an emotional core, the thing of the story, an ordinary human thing involving birth, death, marriage, and parenthood, around which mclennan elaborates swirling arabesques of language, image, and thought. Figure and ground, object and mystery. Author as a lone skater on a pristine sheet of ice, unscrolling his mind. mclennan’s sentences are elegantly dramatic and precise. He is a master of the sapient aphorism, the exquisite detail, and cascading sequences of word associations that are pure poetry. Two things to notice especially in this regard: the stories are grounded in place (Ottawa and the Valley landscape streaming by), but there are a dozen very short texts all entitled “On Beauty,” together to be read as part of mclennan’s strategy of contrasting and alternating figure and ground. The real, the human, and the Canadian are set inside the frame of beauty. Beauty insists. All this life is beautiful, the author says.” Douglas Glover, author of Elle and Savage Love

“Though I am often mistrustful of literary notions of Beauty, I am not being ironic when I say this book of stories On Beauty is in fact Beautiful. It’s a beauty attributable, in part, to the author’s response to wide philosophical and literary readings over time, little threads of which wind comfortably through these almost conversational tales of everyday life in a city called Ottawa. rob mclennan, the critic, is also a thoughtful reader of poetry. It is not surprising, then, that his sentences are written with the ear of a poet, forging the painful dramas and small pleasures of the everyday lives of generations, of neighbours, in ordinary neighbourhood contexts, into an episodic suite that has the depth and complexity of a good novel. Above all, I am struck by the descriptive accuracy of the prose, the hot Ottawa streets, for example, that I also remember from childhood. The details of a certain Scottish heritage. The portrait of a city almost empty in the middle [save for the Parliament]. The relations of son to Mother, Father, children. On Beauty underscores once more that it takes a good reader to make good writing.” Gail Scott, author of Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012]

On Beauty is a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion. Composed with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, rob mclennan’s brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into intimate fragments of the everyday. A welcome chronicle of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations.

IF YOU CAN'T WAIT AND WANT A COPY FROM ME: the book itself is $25 + shipping ($5.40 for Canada; $12 for United States); either paypal/e-transfer to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail (dot) com

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com