rob mclennan
Born in Ottawa in 1970 at the late lamented Grace Hospital on Wellington Street near Parkdale Avenue, rob mclennan currently lives in directly between Ottawa`s Chinatown and Little Italy neighbourhoods, and was called "Centretown`s poet laureate" by David Gladstone in The Centretown Buzz in the mid-1990s. The author of twelve previous trade poetry collections in Canada and England, he has published poetry, fiction, interviews, reviews and columns in over two hundred publications in fourteen countries and in four languages, and done reading tours in five countries on two continents. The editor/publisher of above/ground press and the long poem magazine STANZAS (both founded in 1993), the online critical journal Poetics.ca (with Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell) and the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater (ottawater.com), he edits the ongoing Cauldron Books series through Broken Jaw Press, edited the anthologies Evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press), side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press), GROUNDSWELL: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press) and Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books), and runs the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which he co-founded in 1994, currently under the umbrella of the small press action network - ottawa (span-o), which he also runs. Fall 2007 sees the appearance of a new poetry collection with Ireland`s Salmon Publishing, a collection of literary essays appears with Toronto`s ECW Press, and a title for Vancouver publisher Arsenal Pulp Press, Ottawa: The Unknown City. His online home is at www.track0.com/rob_mclennan, and he often posts reviews, essays, rants and other nonsense at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com.

A The property boundary is handmade (shared). Fluid, and only fluid. Unless you know precisely where. The skin and space of white noise (hearth). One hundred foot of fence. Language is impermanent. We retain nothing, have no specific form. The latent grass, explode; infect the yard and underneath the stone-work. The neighbour’s garden, glistens. Scars. We translate always from another. B Confirm my personal association. The lawn requires trim, and so it does. A sanity short of despair. Lawn ornaments are temporal. And yet: this sky of relative divergence upon the written word, my daughter’s childhood memories. What separates us no more a thickness than this house brick. At best, let’s say.

Cyclops Review, The
by Chandra Mayor; Daniel Brooks; Jason Camlot; Kate Hall; Adrienne Ho; Clive Holden; Catherine Hunter; Stephanie Bolster; Monique MacLeod; rob mclennan; Daphne Marlatt; David McGimpsy; Daniel David Moses; Hal Niedzviecki; John K Samson; Steve Smith; Michelle Sterling; Corey Frost; Robert Budde & Kate Sterns
The Most Spontaneous Thing
Adrienne Ho
Walking toward Bank Street in winter, cold showing in our breaths. You leapt
pressed my back down against what would have been a raised flowerbed in summer, your mouth planting kisses.
The whole few seconds, I was thinking: what if someone's looking, what if in my backpack I carried some blown glass ornament you didn't know about?










Decalogue

Decalogue 2

Ground Rules

The Calgary Renaissance
There is No Mountain
