rob mclennan : Gravity Siren, by Monroe Lawrence

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).

Monroe Lawrence : Silt

 

 

 

 

Suddenly she climbs in the cockpit & has a
great facility for the controls: creeping
between the dappled concrete structures.
          This is
          movement,
          sontaneous &
          improvised,
some vulnerable modernism thrusting
in the slanting maw of copings. Grey
or meridian-like, these abutments starve back
through air, or through sky & lakemelt &
          sediment of
          ash as the beach crabs
          open & close
          their brittle
          pincer-arms in time
          & tune
          with the temperate
saline fluctuation. Stop me. Down a path lined
with snow & wildflower, & simple rashes
of ailanthus, androgyny commences
wimpling forth & back in revolutionary
          leave-taking,
          faded on the slopes
          of the bladed
          offramp.
          The hillside
          dimples with frost:
          pale blue gone
          grey in the twilight—
Silt dances up & down the path in sandals, some
call him Silo through the pleonastic
          dune passage.
          Attention flitting
          from the
          bloom
          of arm movements:
          the wig
          swings
          in centrifugal
          revolutions, black
on black; uterine on a flowing golf course. Architecture,
limbs cooled in the dilapidated lakemelt. Silt
Silo, where calcium is visible in the snap
of grasshoppers: so few
          remain as warmth’s
          scolding to the
          synaptic
          sunflower. Drag-
          ging their critterlike
          speech sounds
          on the slow teeth. We
          need the delayed
          traces of
          “urgently” or “sheepishly”:
          I recognize
we’re saying goodbye in all this,
willing the landing of the beeping mothership. Nothing
is as moving to me, as my own
line—as the meteors slam the pastoral hillside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monroe Lawrence was born on Vancouver Island, Canada. They grew up in Squamish on the traditional territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw. They are the author of About to Be Young and Gravity Siren.