rob mclennan – författare

Cast during his year in the U of A's writer in residency, wild horses is Ottawan rob mclennan's deep lyrical engagement with Edmonton, Alberta. He sees the new terrain through his peculiar, sympathising lens--characterised by impassioned tones that range from brusque to tender. There is something of the magpie in him: nothing escapes his subtle gaze, his flighty wit, his voracious gleaning of experience. His supple lines meander and flit over scapes of love, home, family, and literature, rewarding the magpie-minded with a lucid estrangement to things both unfamiliar and familiar.

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.

Written while at home full-time with two small children under five, the book of smaller is a collection of short, sharp, incredibly dense prose poems. Created in moments snatched from chaos, these poems challenge the possibilities of language in very small spaces. Each poem is a still moment, a memory, a burst of observation, suspended outside time and held up to the light as the world whirls around it. Some are intimate, some are public, all are grounded personal, domestic space. With trademark intelligence and daring, rob mclennan uses radical structures to express the concision and disorientation, jumps in sense and mood, the collapse of time and duration, the shattering joy and powerful fears, of full-person, full-time parenthood. With an unparalleled knowledge of modern poetry and poetic evolution, mclennan breaks the sentence into its most vital pieces, then breaks it further, smashes punctuation out of the expected into spaces of risk and uncertainty, pushing conventions to the edge and then beyond to challenge what writing is, and what a reader can be.

Fantastically rooted in the local and in the family, the book of sentences captures small, quiet, and intimate domestic moments with snippets of grammar lightly held to themselves by lineation and punctuation. These poems move quickly, processing the wonder of the everyday with careful observation, speculation, memory, citation, and play.Radically and everywhere metalingual, the book of sentences builds on mclennan’s previous meditation on domestic joys, the book of smaller and the work of other poets while naming its own writing in the vocabulary of linguistics. It proceeds in a family tuned series of adjustments, amendings, resistances, and acceptances, reflecting on parenthood, childhood, family far and near, the past, the present, and the future.With finesse of phrase and rhythm, patience and savouring of the moment, and care for nuance and association, rob meclennan shares work that is meditative, witty, humorous, and tender. Conjuring a special sense of immediacy, the book of sentences affirms the wonder and pleasure of everyday life.

Fantastically rooted in the local and in the family, the book of sentences captures small, quiet, and intimate domestic moments with snippets of grammar lightly held to themselves by lineation and punctuation. These poems move quickly, processing the wonder of the everyday with careful observation, speculation, memory, citation, and play.Radically and everywhere metalingual, the book of sentences builds on mclennan's previous meditation on domestic joys, the book of smaller and the work of other poets while naming its own writing in the vocabulary of linguistics. It proceeds in a family tuned series of adjustments, amendings, resistances, and acceptances, reflecting on parenthood, childhood, family far and near, the past, the present, and the future.With finesse of phrase and rhythm, patience and savouring of the moment, and care for nuance and association, rob meclennan shares work that is meditative, witty, humorous, and tender. Conjuring a special sense of immediacy, the book of sentences affirms the wonder and pleasure of everyday life.