Heidi Greco reviews essays in the face of uncertainties (2022) in subTerrain #94!

Thanks much to Heidi Greco, who reviewed my suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), in subTerrain #94! Naturally, you can order a copy of the book from the publisher directly, or even from me! Here's an excerpt of her review (the review is roughly three times longer than this):

     mclennan is also amazingly widely-read. I can only imagine the bookshelves in his home. Nearly every essay references the work of some writer -- from those whose work I know to those well beyond my ken. [...] Yet this book isn't some high-falutin' literary treatise; it's an extended diary and includes bits of material long since posted on his blog -- often about matters as mundane as washing floors, doing laundry, and dealing with grocery shopping. It's also about some of the grim realities of the pandemic -- the death counts so high in New York that refrigerator trucks serve as temporary morgues, the absurdities of valuing the economy over the preservation of lives. These were also the days when Breonna Taylor and George Floyd died at the hands of police, causing racial tensions to surge. Personal loss also figures into these pages; he addresses the difficulties of unresolved grief from not being able to observe the rituals many of us rely upon for dealing with death.
     On the other hand, there is also much in the way of abounding joy, often via the behaviours of his six- and four-year-old daughters, Rose and Aoife. They build Lego villages on the dining room table, and go through what often sounds like a repertoire of costume changes over the course of a day -- from dressing like a cat or a witch or an elf to donning bathing suits and pretending to swim indoors. As for his own sartorial splendours, the author takes pride in earning an award for the 'best beard' during Covid, and even admits to wearing house slippers when he runs errands. Truly, a man after my own heart, though even he draws the line at what Fox Mulder warned about in an old X-Files, "...the return of drawstring pants."
    This book is a kind of time capsule for the future -- documenting a period of collective uncertainty, when we were isolated from one another, not only physically, but to an extent, psychically. A time when one of mclennan's steady refrains was our most reliable reality: "We wash our hands. We wash our hands." A time that we can only hope we have finally (at least mostly) left behind.