Rachel Robb
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
Rachel Robb is a writer and educator of Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her poetry has been featured in the Bridport Prize anthology and shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Alpine Fellowship, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Robb’s work has also appeared in anthologies for the gritLit Festival and The Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story. She won the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize for her poem, “Palimpsest County.” Robb is currently working on her first collection of poetry. She lives in Toronto.
The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.
What first brought you to poetry?
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over the past year. Poetry seems to me the most honest and graceful way of making sense of the world and my place in it.
What is it about writing, specifically poetry, that provides you such clarity?
For whatever strange reason, it is the easiest route for me to access my unconscious self, that mysterious centre that seems to be able to make weird, open-eyed observations about things. After this initial rush of feeling, the editing begins, which for me is a more intellectual process of rewriting, throwing everything out, then pulling it back out of the bin, perseverating over word choice and the like.
Have you had any models or mentors for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What work has struck you, enough that it took hold?
Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris affected me deeply. Mostly I follow tangents and recommendations from friends or poets I read in The New Yorker. I’m always discovering new poets. There are so many beautiful poets in the world! Recently I stumbled upon Tyehimba Jess and I’m obsessed.
What is it about Glück’s The Wild Iris, or Jess’ work, that specifically strikes? And how do or might those influences show up in your work?
Poems told through the voice of flowers. What an idea! It still blows my mind. I admire Glück’s ability not only to create such devastating imagery from the natural world, but somehow to make tangible the essence, or the soul, of the flora and fauna around us. That’s something I strive for in my own writing, though I’ve not reached it yet.
With Jess’ poetry, I’m floored by the hybrid, wild style of his poems. For example, his poem about the musician Sam Patterson is written in interview form and so many of his poems use styles I’ve never encountered before, like contrapuntal poems, where the lines can be read vertically, horizontally, diagonally. It’s wild how he plays with form. I’m still figuring his poems out. Maybe one day I’ll take risks like that in my own work.
How are you finding the process of attempting to build a full-length manuscript? Is the shape coming naturally through clusters or more difficult? Have you a shape in mind as you work?
I don’t yet have a shape in mind. I’m actually terrible at identifying throughlines. In fact I wrote a poem about it. I write about what sparks curiosity for me in a given day and really dislike writing to a predetermined theme, so I think many of my poems feel quite disparate from one another. I will definitely need outside eyes when pulling together the final manuscript.
How do your poems begin?
Usually something in nature catches my attention. For example, I found a dead juvenile Cooper’s hawk in the forest by my father-in-law’s place and it was so perfectly preserved despite all the muck and ice around it or I pass this gorgeous bed of orange tulips each day on my way to work and they’re at the stage where they’re falling over themselves, really delicious, but clearly on their way out. It percolates for a week or so, depending on my schedule. I have a full-time job and kids and a dog, so writing has to wait until those domestic obligations are fulfilled.
Or I’ve read something by an author that moves me and I respond to it poetically.
Another time I had a dream about owls that shook me up, so I wrote about it that week.
Is the act of writing one you see as physical, even visceral?
Not for me personally, but maybe others experience this. Although walking always helps get the ideas flowing.
The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He recently returned from a week quietly working at the Banff Centre, during which time he participated in karaoke twice, was part of a livestream reading, and stayed up well past his usual bedtime to hang with an group of Canadian playwrights.
