folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
Turn the fabric over and you’re lost.
Poison, drinks. So possibly fabric. Slender, coach. To introduce myself. To move, with short steps. A future, recurring. We are tangled, in. Garments, alphabet. Feathers. This impossible novel. New stresser, unlocked. There are no preparations. If I could blossom. What is this, Europe. I can see Greenland. Under snow, pages whiten. Beneath sand and discourse. Held, without model. Without form. State. Stateless. I want what they have, what they offer. The book, as it written.
, strong winter silhouette.
Carved, this sunrise. In some way, ludic. You have to feel it. Held, into presence. Fireworks. Flat, and endless. The length of a mountain, a snowfall. Evasion. Despair, not a birthmark. Memory, muscle. Interior. Days of the week, in this room. Garden, the apple. Bramble. Careful reading, mends solitude. An encounter, translated. To allow for resistance. To hold out. To require.
After completing “Autobiography,” the third in a trilogy of titles that includes the book of smaller (University of Alberta Press, 2022) and the book of sentences (University of Alberta Press, 2025), I spent about three years focusing on non-fiction projects—“the green notebook” and “the genealogy book”—although there were two poetry-prompt projects that I would poke at every so often, throughout. One of this pair emerged from a year’s-worth of weekly prompts from Benjamin Niespodziany (a chapbook from such appeared last week with above/ground press), and a further, “Fair bodies of unseen prose,” a project responding to a book-length response by Laynie Browne to a book by Rosmarie Waldrop [I describe the project a bit further, here], a manuscript I recently put the finishing touches upon, after some eighteen months. I enjoy the flow of these short bursts, allowing for the music of a single stanza to flow purely by sound, rhythm and punctuation, ignoring the line-break entirely. Little poems of liquid, one might say, that fit so neatly into whatever containers are available. Since July, I’ve been working on a sequence of essays on poets, a third manuscript of short stories (having completed a second a couple of years back), as well as a further manuscript of poems, “The Museum of Practical Things.”
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 some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current 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.
