Gravity Siren, Monroe Lawrence
Beautiful Days Press, 2026
The latest poetry title by award-winning Vancouver Island-born Colorado-based poet Monroe Lawrence, following the full-length debut, About to Be Young (The Elephants, 2021), is the long poem Gravity Siren (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2026), published as Beautiful Days Press #14. There’s a curious rhythm to the poems, the book-length suite, of Lawrence’s Gravity Siren, a push and a pause, pause, push and pause; not set as hesitations but breath nodes, thought-pauses, moments where one might catch breath. “I am a Tree of / blame & loss.” they write, mid-way through the collection, “So, mannequin, are you?— / & the poem / Means my trembling love for you. The door / claps the sky—echoing a blunt / event in sockets [.]” Held plainly and unapologetically as an book-length love poem, there’s a way Lawrence holds a single word or phrase in place that is quite striking, amid such a heft of language, of ongoingness. It is the counterpoint of pause, of intimacy and small moments, this hush, that allows the poems, the poem, to not overwhelm. “The line of trees,” they write, early on in the collection, “so of orchard / that the stones encircle my pain & / pin sheets of rubber to the dawn. Small / patterns fill the stone / circle—dark / rubble lurks / under the bay. / Even these / plants can plunder secret tripwires.”
Just as their debut, About to Be Young, was composed as a small, compact, fragmented and expansive book-length poem, set as more accumulation than narrative, offering a fresh way of approach both the lyric and the line through which the long poem is held, this new title, Gravity Siren, asserts itself through similar structures, while also providing an incredible silence; a book-length suite of fragments, pixilated with pristine detail, providing a portrait of intimate space, of detailed attention to moments, purposefully layered, once you, as reader, able to step finally back to see.
I have no torso; I have
no teeth.
Shivering, the storm
lavishes me with rain.
I sing of diamonds tracing
the swan--& that phosphorescence
shall appear as foam on
my palm.
The grasshoppers lay flat
with calm.
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). Oh, and he just had a lovely little chapbook out with Broke Press, an excerpt of his forthcoming “Autobiography” (University of Calgary Press).
