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.

some reviews + interviews re: On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024)

I've been feeling very fortunate for the amount of reviews/interviews around my collection of short stories, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), a book not yet a year old. And might we see you this afternoon at the Made in Alta Vista Market? Jim Tubman Chevrolet Rink, 2185 Arch Street, Ottawa (outside the  Canterbury Recreation Complex). I'll have copies of On Beauty available for sale (along with a whole slew of other books/chapbooks etcetera) from 4-8pm. Come on by! And don't forget I'm reading in Ottawa with Amanda Earl and Christine McNair this coming Sunday! June 1, 2pm at the Lieutenant's Pump at 361 Elgin Street (most likely from a slew of unpublished work, fyi)

I recently caught Andrew Torry's review over at Alberta Views, which is pretty good, but it was Salma Hussain via The Temz Review that is easily my favourite (she really gets what the book was attempting/doing, etcetera). There's also Michael Greenstein via The Seaboard Review, Joyce MacPhee via Apartment613, Natasha Baldin via The Charlatan, the piece "8 Alberta Books That Don't Follow the Rules" at ReadAlberta.ca (is mine an "Alberta Book"? I mean, it was produced by a publisher in Alberta; does that make it an "Alberta Book"?), Alice Violett via her blog and J Jill Robinson, via Goodreads. So nice! Hugely appreciating how many folk are responding at all, let alone so positively. As well, further reviews of my work I've linked over here, on my author website.

There have even been a few interviews around the collection, which is pretty cool. Hollay Ghadery and I discussed the collection as part of the New Books Network podcast not long back, via JWT BookAdventures, reposted for reading ease at my clever substack, with Jamie Tennant over at his podcast last fall, with Ivy Grimes via her substack, and with the delightfully-brilliant Alan Neal as part of CBC Ottawa's All in a Day, which was enormously cool. As well, further interviews I've done exist over here, in case such appeals (there's a whole bunch of them, including some other recent ones). Here's hoping I can place the follow-up collection, which has been making the rounds since last summer (and hopefully this year I can complete the novel-in-progress that sits between the two collections, finally). And, naturally, there's always that small part of me that wants to get all of this off my plate so I can begin to dig deep into some new prose-thoughts I've been having lately around The Crystal Palace, of all places. Where might that go?

two new reviews!

It has been very nice to see two new reviews of my titles pop up lately! Pearl Pirie was good enough to review World's End, (ARP Books, 2023) over at The Miramichi Review, and Nick Thran offered this review of the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) via Event magazine; thanks so much! And of course, I'm attempting to keep track of all links to my reviews over at my author site, here.

some updates: poems, interview, review, substack etc.

I often forget to include such things, so I'll mention that I had poems up recently at Olney and Pinhole Poetry and Horseshoe Literary Magazine, was interviewed by Pinhole Poetry as well, and there was even the first review of my suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), up at The Typescript! What!

I've been buried lately in a new non-fiction project which I'm hoping to start posting fragments of soon, over at my enormously clever substack. You already know about that, though, right? I've been posting there for a while now, focusing on excerpts of larger non-fiction projects, including "Lecture for an Empty Room," a book-length essay I've been working on, writing on literature, community, etcetera (among other things).

Oh, and don't forget the above/ground press 30th anniversary fundraiser is but days away from ending! There are still plenty of bundles!

A ‘best of’ list of 2022 Canadian poetry books

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my twelfth annual list [see also: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing opportunity, and her original prompt.

I can’t get to everything (and the fact that I keep trying is seeming to be increasingly ridiculous), which means there are multiple titles this year I haven’t managed to properly respond to, including Lisa Robertson’s Boat (Coach House Books, 2022), Dale Tracy’s Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022) or Manahil Bandukwala’s MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022) (among others, I’m sure). And didn’t Kasia Van Schaik’s short story collection We Have Never Lived On Earth (University of Alberta Press, 2022) just land on my doorstep as I was compiling this very list? And Stuart Ross’ I Am Claude François and You Are A Bathtub (Anvil Press, 2022)! There’s been some remarkable non-fiction by Canadian writers that I’ve managed to get to this year: Stuart Ross’ The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press, 2022)[see my review of such here], Sina Queyras’ Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf (Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Emma Healey’s Best Young Woman Job Book: A Memoir (Random House Canada, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes (Book*hug, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Otherwise, between my own blog and what I’ve managed via periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, I’ve posted more than one hundred and fifty book reviews this past year, and managed more than one hundred and fifty posted interviews as well, between my ’12 or 20 (second series) questions’ series, the bibliography series and via Touch the Donkey. And did you see I’ve started a substack for the sake of prompting a book-length essay I’ve had in my head recently? Or that my chapbook press, above/ground press, turns THIRTY YEARS OLD THIS YEAR? Oh, and that I’ve published two books this past year: the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press) and essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press)? So many things!

This year’s list includes full-length poetry titles by R. Kolewe, Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin and Tom Prime, Sylvia Legris, Michael Trussler, Chantal Gibson, Ellie Sawatzky, Zane Koss, Sarah de Leeuw, Daniel Sarah Karasik, Mikko Harvey, Laurie D. Graham, Phoebe Wang, Jim Johnstone, Matthew James Weigel, Madhur Anand, Andrew Faulkner, Gillian Sze, Nancy Holmes, Ayaz Pirani, Catriona Strang, Nicole Markotić, Arleen Paré, Prathna Lor, Annharte, Nanci Lee, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, Ivan Drury, Alisha Kaplan, Stephen Brockwell, Tasnuva Hayden, Michael Goodfellow, Michael Crummey, Luke Hathaway, Victoria Mbabazi, Annick MacAskill, Conyer Clayton, Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin, Derek Beaulieu, Nicole Brossard, Kristjana Gunnars, Gary Barwin, Natalie Wee, Sarah Ens, Kate Hargreaves, Sophie Crocker, River Halen, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Cameron Anstee, Cecily Nicholson, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Phil Hall, Edward Byrne and Amy Dennis. I mean, that’s a lot, right?

Make sure to catch this year's entire list here!

Margo LaPierre reviews my Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil) for PRISM International

Thanks very much to Ottawa poet Margo LaPierre for reviewing my Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) over at PRISM International! You can always order a copy from me if you are so inclined, by the way; shoot me at email at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com / send $20 and I'll mail one within Canada / send $23 and I'll mail one to the US ; or you can order via the publisher direct (obviously). See LaPierre's review here. As she writes:

Life Sentence,
rob mclennan
Spuyten Duyvil, 2019

Review by Margo LaPierre 

Life Sentence, (the unusual punctuation is deliberate, you’ll see) is a poetry collection that begins quietly, with much purpose, and picks up speed as it goes along like a river wending its way through springtime. rob mclennan commences the book with a dedication to his father, which opens to a spare, image-rich account of his father ill with cancer: locked in his body, in silence, in hospital. Metaphors of the self as a flowing thing abound. We know that flows can weaken, dry up, or be disrupted:

Hand, white hand of rain. Biopsy, cures. Have yet to centre. What was not, derailed. Amend, deleted. Current. Disputed streams. Railing, spillway, creek. A sated, broadband. Record, disposition.

Life-flow, as it etches forward, can also accumulate, become torrential. We witness this in the trajectory of the collection. mclennan records his father’s illness, memories of his late mother, and his own experience of finding love and its progressions: becoming a husband, becoming a father:

Situational: two-fold. Become as we become, parents and unparented. A continuation, sequenced. My daughter, a small plastic duck. In earth rotation, heavens. Will to overcome.

mclennan’s language is deliberate, and thanks to his clever and controlled use of punctuation, the poems tell readers exactly how they would like to be read. Short sentences are structured in a way that suggests balance, an equivalence between asymmetric elements. Some words that you’d otherwise wing past gain new meaning. The result is an underlying sense of composure. As I read these poems, I had the sense of sitting surfside, listening to waves come in and out—the rhythm had that same sense of inhalation/exhalation, both evoking the basic function of the body and also the tidal nature of the planet itself. Wave in, wave out. Breath in, breath out. Connections between the body and natural terrain are drawn more explicitly throughout the book, but this structural parity creates a potent atmosphere that would have been near impossible to achieve through word choice alone. How does mclennan do this? Through distinctive use of punctuation, particularly the comma. For example:

Colon, semi-colon. Stop. Just stop. A sentence, shortened. This long sentence, long. Perilous, condensed. Where you have gone. The river’s slowness, lake. The slowness of these phrases. A most satisfying taste.

What do signs, maps, signals, latitudes, and in some cases, currents all have in common? They are signifiers, they refer to natural phenomena, natural terrain. Such is the case with language, and I get the sense that mclennan sees language as a physical representation of the body—one that is parallel; that never quite touches the body, reality, or experience, but runs alongside it, mapping it out. In the collection’s final notes, mclennan writes that he’s long been taken with bpNichol’s idea of a “poem as long as a life.” mclennan states that he prioritizes the process over narrative, but that nonetheless the contents of his poems are taken from moments in his own life. What we get is a textural account of an era of his life. Confessional poetry, this is not. It’s as though the language of mclennan’s life is as important as the life lived, and once again, there’s that one-to-one ratio that distinguishes this work. My favourite moments of the book were in the understated accounts of new love—the heightened, loving details work well under mclennan’s close-up, granular focus. 

          Speak, a river. Deepening. Construct a voice. What is a dream.   Salacious, taste. Ceramic. Porcelain, she reaching. 
          Claims. Baggage, format. Clear-eyed. Ovulatrix. Standard, in compulsion. 
                    Registry, conflates. We have been married, days. We list the age, require metric. Parlour, as an outburst. Stillness, leisure. Serious cakes. This plunge.

Life Sentence, is at once joyful, measured, contemplative, engaged. Readers living in Ottawa will enjoy the Bank Street poems (especially since the recent health crisis has restricted us from leisurely wandering down busy city streets). Cat-lovers like myself will enjoy the appearance of a polydactyl kitty. With this book, mclennan traces the fullness of a life, while rejoicing and grieving the blows and treasures of being given life, and also giving it. 

Notes and Dispatches: Essays by rob mclennan, reviewed by Julian Day

Hey! Winnipeg poet Julian Day was good enough to review my second collection of essays over at Empty Mirror! I don't even know if copies are even available anymore (although I always have a couple of copies for sale, of course). Might they be? Either way, thanks!

See the original review here.

Notes and Dispatches: Essays by rob mclennan / Insomniac Press / 2014 / 978-1554831265 / 318 pages

rob mclennan has operated above/ground press from his home base of Ottawa for more than twenty-seven years, publishing over a thousand items since the press’ inception in 1993. He is himself a prolific writer, with more than twenty books of stories, poems, and essays to his name. In Notes and Dispatches: Essays, a collection of his writings from 2010 to 2014, he displays remarkable breadth and depth. mclennan’s interest is not just in writers and writing, but also circumstance and surroundings, and he is as much interested in how these external factors affect writing as in the output itself.

Throughout the book, he moves between person and place, subject and geography. In the introduction, he writes that each of his essays begins first with curiosity, as he tries to learn, through their writing, some aspect of an author or subject that can’t be understood otherwise. By starting with this pearl of curiosity, and enlarging his understanding through writing, mclennan provides a series of snapshots, each one focused on a figure or aspect from Canadian or American literature.

The essays in this collection are as diverse as they are personal. The first piece, “Reading and Writing Glengarry County: writing the Long Sault hydroelectric project”, describes the St. Lawrence Seaway project of the 1950s, tracing its indelible mark on the landscape of the region, and how entire communities were created, destroyed, or relocated by the project’s ambition. Weaving in recollections of his father’s life with Don McKay’s out-of-print long poem “Long Sault” and other sources, mclennan describes how the project’s scope changed Glengarry County forever. At the other end of the collection, in the penultimate essay, mclennan delves into his family history, tracing the McLennans from Scotland to Glengarry County, through to northern Alberta, British Columbia, and California. “Genealogy,” he writes, “really is akin to archaeology” (299), closing the piece with a note about his grandparents’ first child, named only as “Baby girl McLennan” in the newspaper obituary. Those who would have known her name, he writes, passed away years before he started his own inquiries. Despite our desire for understanding, for a full knowledge and accounting of ourselves and our histories, mclennan shows there are limits to how far we can ultimately dig.

Between these essays, the writings turn between geographies and the writers that inhabit them, often in the same piece: Douglas Barbour, an Edmonton poet mclennan feels was never given his full due; the poets and poetry of Vancouver and the west coast, including Roy Kiyooka, Meredith Quartermain, and Sachiko Murakami; essays on Lisa Robertson, Sylvia Legris, the American poet Sarah Manguso, and others; and “A note on Miss Canada”, on a piece by mclennan himself, describing how the sequence of voices in that work was partially informed by his trips between Toronto and Ottawa, where the dead played out in missing person posters taped to, then removed from, diner walls along the way.

mclennan is generous with the work of others, but the strongest work in the collection is autobiographical. In “The green-wood essay: a little autobiographical dictionary”, mclennan uses eight short sections to connect his family history to discussions of the pastoral, notes on the changing urban/rural landscape, poets whose lives began in farm country, and whether it is possible to be pastoral in a deeply urban landscape. The work shifts between sentences and fragments, in and out of poetry, working in mclennan’s distinct poetic style:

Instead of recess, played my scales. Another lesson. A further removal from bonding with my peers, already quiet, shy. Out on the farm, with barely a neighbour my age. Thirteen years of lessons, told to practice instead of wasting, wandering time. I wasted time. I put my head down. Played. I suppose, then, this was discipline. Certain notions set aside. (75)

“green wood”, a journey through mclennan’s foundations, allows the reader a view into his core tenets and beliefs – and foundations, mclennan writes, “rarely change, no matter subsequent constructions” (77). mclennan’s foundation is Glengarry County, and the red brick house where his father still lives; it is the move so many of us have made within the last few generations, leaving farms and villages for towns and cities; it is how he “absorbed books, consumed them” (75) – and how he still does. That was his life, and that is his life.

“How do books begin?”, mclennan asks (209). In Notes and Dispatches: Essays, the beginning and the end are geography: physical and human, intertwined and inseparable. We can never remove ourselves from the physical world; we are a product of our childhoods and upbringings, and the lives we choose for ourselves. The personal is the physical. Each of us are necessarily a part of where we live, and as mclennan deftly demonstrates, where we live, where we’re from, form an inseparable part of ourselves as well. “We already live in the world,” mclennan writes. “Why pretend to be apart?” (78)

Ali Znaidi reviews A perimeter (2016) in Empty Mirror

Poet and translator Ali Znaidi was good enough to provide a lengthy review of my poetry title, A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016), via Empty Mirror. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. This is actually the second review of my New Star title, after Jonathan Ball wrote a brief review of such via the Winnipeg Free Press. And of course, you can still order copies of the book through the publisher (or me, even).

A perimeter by rob mclennan / New Star Books / 978-1-55420-128-0 / paperback / 80 pages / 2016

In A perimeter rob mclennan has ordered the poems which were written between 2010 and 2014 in a way that the cumulative force makes us savour those new things that have happened to him: A new daughter; Rose, a new lodging experience, and a new surrounding. This is shown from the very outset in the dedication page:

for Rose Irene Valentina McLennan,
who arrived just then,

A perimeter - poetry by rob mclennanThis collection spins keen observations and strong stories of a new father and the oppression that fills his days as he is caught between writing and fatherhood or precisely “[c]aught, between ambition and exhaustion” (page 5). mclennan’s poems are set in Alta Vista Drive in Canada where he becomes an owner of his home. Speaking to his neighbourhood newspaper, VISTAS [PDF], in its October 2016 issue, rob mclennan says in page 17, “I’m also now in an area familiar to family history: my maternal grandparents original owners of a house on Kirk Drive, a street later renamed Ridgemont. My parents married in the church across the street from our front door, and relocated nearly an hour’s drive east, near Maxville, to his home property. How do I rewrite myself into this familial space?”

A perimeter is a work of exploration and self-discovery in which the poet tries to show those changes that have appeared in his entirely new situation and their effects on his daily life and writing habits. mclennan depicts many details of his daily life through tactile references. Nevertheless, the raw problems he touches upon are universal; issues of conjugal relationships after the birth of a new child, spouse roles, struggles to do house chores, and how to find time to write, and the exhaustion and frustration that accompany all that. This elegiac fragment is but an illustrative example of his nostalgia for sufficient and satisfactory sleep: “u((n)in)t(e)rr((u)pte)d) s(l))ee)p” (page 8).

Grappling with living in the world as poet and as a new father, and despite lack and interruption of sleep, mclennan finds solace and comfort in the beauty of his new daughter. In these beautiful lines, for instance, his daughter Rose and the rose become interchangeable terms. He draws from the haiku traditions of simplicity and conciseness to tell a story of beauty. mclennan intertwines the free-verse form, which is rich with a strong narration, with the delicate short Japanese form, drawing stunning images to emphasize the beauty he is generating. At the end, Rose’s interruption of his muse engenders a newer poem that is more beautiful; something akin to the opening of a petal:

Such wonderful scraps. Rose sleeps,
she stirs, she interrupts the poem. I am crafting
a why, when. Rose unfolds, a petal opens.

You are beautiful. You are like we.
(page 9)

In this collection, the personal intersects with his civilian life. Moving on, the poet takes a light political stance through raw imagery. While readers are immersed in the “newness” of the poet’s life, mclennan surprises them with bitterness. He says:

I see nothing new
in the whole of this country; bitter threads
(page 26)

These two lines would jolt most of us into self-critique. This time, the poet creates bitterness out of newness through effective and poignant language.

Exploration, rediscovery, and self-critique are shown from the outset of the abecedarian poem “A perimeter” in which he ponders on the new space of 1950s suburb, and focuses attention upon the issues of boundaries, location, and ownership through a well-crafted combination of poetic technique. His ruminations upon these issues are coupled with the problems of authorship and naming through language which is “impermanent.” He says in the first section, “A” :

The property boundary is handmade (shared). Fluid,
and only fluid. Unless
you know precisely where. The skin

and space of white noise (hearth). One hundred foot of fence.

Language is impermanent. We retain nothing, have no
specific form. The latent grass, explode; infect
the yard and underneath the stone-work.
(page 43)

In his book, Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975-1984 Charles Bernstein states that “poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena” (page 220). In this regard, mclennan assumes the role of a philosopher. He attempts through plumbing psychological and interpersonal depths to show to what extent a new space or a new map can affect his world view and to what extent a new locale and shift in perspective and vision can affect his poetic craft. With mclennan and his enviable craftsmanship with language, one cannot help but relish in philosophy, while savouring the poetic language of a poet-choreographer, who knows how to make words dance on the paper. The movements are natural, measured and astonishingly sophisticated, all at the same time. In this quoted passage (page 38), for instance, one cannot help but delight in mclennan’s dancing words:

                reworking, legends: archive, scraps
I was moving very quickly;

Thus, the reading that mclennan’s poetry suggests or requires is a reading that keeps on “viewing” or “seeing” the text on the paper, otherwise the reader would find the language of the poem inarticulate, obscure and meaningless. mclennan is a master when it comes to sprinkling words on the page like a masterful baker who sprinkles cumin on bread to make it delicious and mouth-watering. Hence the reader would be captivated by the layout of the poem and its visual aspects. mclennan, thus, uses the means of experimental art but for different ends: not to create a meaningless world but in order to engage readers, and especially the inattentive ones, with his poems and make them aware of what the poem can afford. mclennan’s A perimeter can be looked at as a philosophical inquiry or a treatise that draws attention to one’s adumbrated knowledge of oneself and the world by making it accessible through poetry. Through his uncanny ability to create fragmentary poetic narratives he is able to show a way of seeing/reading the world and the self in a hostile world that neither explains nor gives justifications. Another aspect of philosophy which falls squarely into the realm of this collection is the persistent quest for truth that is coupled with skepticism. Look at this philosophical inquiry which is buried beneath these two lines in page 7:

Not the event but language; laundry cycles, sediment.
Nothing settles.

In this way, and because “nothing settles,” poetry acquires a therapeutic function and serves as a constant injection against metaphysical confusions and the sedimentation and fossilization of the mind. This is achieved through mclennan’s deep awareness of line breaks and the power of the poem layout and form.

rob mclennan’s use of orthography, layout and punctuation is always innovative and especially in this collection. Part of the point, no doubt, is to create the right kind of a free zone in which the poetry can develop; besides, to let readers experience the poem as a thrilling adventure or journey. The poem becomes a narrative interlaced into the larger space of the paper with words trying to transgress borders and boundaries like “a stretch of cedar boughs” as he says in page 48. The poet’s innovative use of punctuation ramps up the tension even more and harkens back again and again to the process and craft of poetry composition. Punctuation becomes an act of transgression and a means to go beyond the fence.

A boundary creates another kind of boundary. A perimeter likewise creates its own recurring perimeters. The book, in fact, rather than offering new boundaries, is cathartic, simultaneously conjuring and exorcising the ghost of boundaries of readers with words, precisely with the kinetic energy of language. The politics of mclennan’s poetry reflects an overwhelming sense that a great perimeter was inflicted upon land and people. The poet demonstrates awareness and creates a startling experience of transgressing perimeters through the extraordinary cumulative effects of a poetics that is permeated with patterned departures and returns because, at the end, as he says on page 44:

[t]he lawn requires trim,
and so it does.

The collection reads as a series of short connected sequences, and focuses on how the perimeter, the boundary, and the fence are controlling our lives, and morphing into metaphors of the capitalistic constraints of society. The poems are both fragmentary and visual, and the dialogue between these two aspects enhances the tension and overall experience of the book. mclennan’s poetry displays a propensity towards transgression and crossing: Each Rose’s step is a poem and each poem is a step deeper into sequencing, into freedom, and into ourselves through, as he says in page 68; the last words of the book, “a task of outlines.”

mclennan’s moving collection is an exercise in reinventing one’s own body, psyche and world. The abundant metaphors are the bits or tools that mclennan gives to readers to reinvent themselves. The poems themselves become dense fragments allowing readers to assume the role of experimental collage artists whose vocation is to reshape and remould the semantic space and the world view. Rather than destroying meaning, mclennan tries to explore the meaninglessness of language not in order to annihilate it but to bestow on it an inner cohesion—something this postmodern era lacks—and to restore confidence as he says in page 14: “what shines is confidence, reduced to letter,”.

mclennan’s poetry is clearly an example for a work of art that looks for new possibilities of meaning beyond “the postmodern condition.” Containing seeds of revolutionary acts and political positions (in a non-radical way) mclennan masterfully explores the fissures in the psyche and the cracks in the walls in this hostile world of now.

a review of wild horses (2010) in the british journal of canadian studies!

While we were in England, and Christine was researching in the British Library, she found this review of my poetry title wild horses (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2010) that we weren't aware of, written by Dr. Will Smith (what?) and published in the British Journal of Canadian Studies. Pretty cool, yes?

Jonathan Ball reviews A perimeter (2016) in the Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Jonathan Ball was good enough to provide the first review of my latest poetry title, A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016). Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. As he writes:

rob mclennan’s A perimeter (New Star, 70 pages, $18) details the struggles of a poet "Caught, between ambition and exhaustion" — in other words, one that is also a dad.

Through fragments that mimic both the fragmentary thought processes of the new father and the tiny slivers of time he can now dedicate to writing, mclennan’s poems crash fragment against fragment in an elegy for "u((n)in)t(e)rr((u)pte)d) s(l))ee)p."

The title poem considers the "property boundary" and the lawn as a place through which to think about identity, a father’s role, and where the personal and public intersect. One of the prolific mclennan’s stronger books.

Notes and Dispatches: Essays reviewed at Maple Tree Literary Supplement

Janet Nicol was good enough to provide the first and only review for my second collection of essays, Notes and Dispatches: Essays (Insomniac Press, 2014) over at Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Much thanks!

Ryan Pratt reviews Acceptance Speech (phafours, 2014)

That kind and attentive Ryan Pratt was good enough to review my mini-chapbook Acceptance Speech (phafours, 2014) over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thanks, Ryan! The poems are from the work-in-progress "World's End," that also includes poems posted on small po[r]tions, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, AngelHousePress and Moss Trill. I'm half-hoping to be completed the manuscript in 2015, but who knows (I'm really trying to complete a collection of short fiction first).

The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) reviewed at Necessary Fiction

Sheldon Lee Compton was good enough to review The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014) over at Necessary Fiction. Thanks, Sheldon! This is actually the fifth review of my first short story collection, after a small write-up by Pearl Pirie (here), and more formal reviews by Ryan Pratt (here), Ryan Pratt (here) and Paul Rocca (here). See Sheldon's review in full here.

The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014) is reviewed in Broken Pencil #64

My collection of short fiction, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) was reviewed by Paul Rocca in the new issue of Broken Pencil. Thanks, Paul! I might be biased, but I think this little collection is absolutely perfect summer reading. Now if I could just get the next collection of short stories finished (my goal for 2014). The short review is now posted over at the Chaudiere Books blog.

NOW AVAILABLE: The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books)--and the first review!

My collection of short, short stories, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) is now available, with an Ottawa launch at The Manx Pub (as part of David O'Meara's Plan 99 Reading Series) on May 10, 2014. Hooray!

And the book has even received its first review! Thanks to The Small Press Book Review.

And of course, I was recently featured on the Chaudiere Books blog. Thanks much to Ottawa artist Danny Hussey for allowing us to use his incredible artwork on the front cover (the second title of mine with Hussey's artwork gracing the cover).

If you wish for a copy of the collection, drop $18 into my PayPal "donate" button (above) (add $1 for US, and $2 for overseas) and I'll mail you a copy. Sound good?

Scott Bryson reviews my chapbook Mother Firth’s (Gaspereau Press, 2013) in Broken Pencil #62

Scott Bryson was good enough to review my Gaspereau Press chapbook, Mother Firth’s, in Broken Pencil #62. Thanks, Scott! I’m gratified by the attention, especially given how few chapbooks receive critical attention, and this is (so far) the first and only review the small chapbook (a twelve-part sequence) has received (not including the small mention in Apt613). Although I’m not entirely sure why most of his qualitative judgements appear to be based upon how well he was able to comprehend the poems; as though figuring out the poem in a particular way is more important than attempting to approach the work on its own terms. Is comprehension, at least in the way Bryson suggests, the first and foremost goal? Is meaning meant to be straightforwardly found? I’m baffled by the assertion that because he doesn’t “comprehend” the piece (in a series of complaints that might seem more relevant if I was producing a non-fiction historical work in prose than a poem that uses historical material as construction material) that somehow there is no meaning to be found at all. It reminds me of a response Gertrude Stein gave to an interview, suggesting that if the reader enjoyed the piece, then that is, by itself, understanding or “getting it.”

Mother Firth’s

rob mclennan

Ottawa-based writer and publisher rob mclennan is reveling in hometown history. Mother Firth’s is the latest addition in a growing collection of books that sees mclennan exploring the nooks and crannies of the nation’s capital. This time out, we visit Isaac Firth’s Inn/Tavern (known as Mother Firth’s), which was established at Chaudière Falls in 1819, in the part of Ottawa that’s now known as LeBreton Flats.

            According to mclennan, Ottawa writers of the late 1800s and early 1900s liked to joke that “if you hadn’t written a poem on the Chaudière Falls or Rapids, you weren’t really an Ottawa poet.” The Falls and the Ottawa River are the clearest recurring images in this collection, so mclennan is now officially in with the in crowd.

            While it’s clear that water or water crafts play a pivotal role in each of these 12 poems, other concrete details are hard to come by. There are moments where mclennan’s verse reads as completely lucid: “In 1827, a year’s first light, William Stewart, / out from County Glen,” but there are just as many that come across as abstract (or perhaps require a great deal of research for comprehension): “A study of parades, authority. A letter / from Dalhousie. Build. / A snowball, given credence.” There’s a particular ambiance emanating from these poems, and though it’s too general to pin down, it seems to hint at the milieu inhabited by the men who frequented Mother Firth’s: soldiers, raftsmen, fur traders.

            Of course, complaining that you can’t find meaning in a rob mclennan poem is like complaining that you can’t extract blood from a stone. The true meaning of these poems will likely only ever be known to mclennan, who’s no doubt hoping that form and atmosphere will trump the need for understanding.

John Lent reviews my Songs for little sleep, (2012) over at Arc poetry magazine,

John Lent was good enough to review my Songs for little sleep, (2012) over at Arc Poetry Magazine. [see the original review here] Thanks, John!

rob mclennan. Songs for little sleep. Koriyama, Japan: Obvious Epiphanies Press, 2012.
~Reviewed by John Lent

Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.
–Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, 1977

I have been aware of rob mclennan’s poetry for fifteen years now, and aware, too, of the boisterous, clever and thoughtful presence he brings to discussions of contemporary poetics. Having said that, however, I will discuss only two aspects of mclennan’s poetics as I understand them in this new volume: faith in the banal and playful diction. To me, both aspects represent risk-taking that I admire in contemporary poetry, even though they carry with them the equal risk of initiating the poem’s collapse. In the end, I think mclennan succeeds in both taking these risks and delivering something rather wonderful in Songs for little sleep.

The first risk is mclennan’s faith in the ordinary. It seems silly, sometimes, talking about the material of poetry in this way—but it’s huge. By ‘ordinary’ I mean the quotidian, throw-away objects & situations & images & voices that mill around and populate these poems. mclennan exhibits faith that this material will open up on the wondrous, on a surprise of complexity maybe, on beauty, or whatever else we might want to name it. As Wittgenstein mutters cryptically in Tractatus, “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” Over and over again in these poems—as their process of creation—mclennan is willing to run the risk of collapsing into the ordinariness he celebrates. As a result, the poems are redeemed by the elusive and resistant and inexplicable and not-to-be-reduced-or-articulated magic that is waiting to ‘show’ itself at the heart of this often-dismissed ‘banal.’ When I was in my thirties, I got a letter from P K Page in which she worried that my poems might suffer from being too “quotidian.” And though I loved P K Page’s wonderful poems (and still do) and seriously sought her approval, something innocent and stubborn in me knew she was wrong about the word. Reading mclennan’s poems carries me back into that moment of struggle with P K Page’s judgment—the wonder of the “quotidian” and the risk of expressing it.

When mclennan refers to the word ‘collaged’ in his end notes, he is referring not only to the first risk mentioned above—allowing the ‘ordinary’ to present itself as a field of juxtapositions, loosely unified—but also to the second risk—allowing ‘play’ in diction and syntax to support other surprises in logic through unexpected association. Again, this is not easy territory; it can readily backfire into a mediocre display of automatic writing (at best) or obscurantism (at worst). But when it works, when it really opens things up—as in Kroetsch, Bowering, bissett, Moure, Cooley, Jake Kennedy, kevin mcpherson eckoff, Natalie Simpson—it can create a true ‘rush’ of making and re-making for the reader. It can be breathtaking. In the context of this risk, mclennan is relaxed and confident and the poems are fascinating and exciting.

If I had been editing this book, I might have advised mclennan to subdue the communal bounce of the self-referential by removing the double-whammy of beginning each poem with a reference to another text (usually written by a friend), then compounding the situation with a dedication to another friend (another writer). In a sequence that is already so committed to the autobiographical, this effect can be a bit cloying. These poems do not need that busy-ness. They stand by themselves just fine.