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)