{"title":"Rob Mclennan","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"notes-dispatches-book-rob-mclennan-9781554831265","title":"Notes \u0026 Dispatches","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49632877117713,"sku":"GOR012687992","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1554831261.jpg?v=1751341335"},{"product_id":"gifts-book-rob-mclennan-9780889226050","title":"gifts","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe eponymous first part of mclennan's new book consists of fifty \"gifts\" each centred around words, phrases, or \"glyphs\" of language that initiate and replicate their own fractal transformations: some remain simply found fragments about which other words and phrases unfold, some lose themselves into pieces that we forget were once found, some mirror themselves in other forms, others become simply something other in language as it moves both with and away from them, each creating a syntax of meaning that is specific to its own occasion. All are addressed to the poet's intimates--two dozen are, significantly, valentines--the rest admonitions, remembrances, messages and homages made public by the readers' acts of witness.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In part two, \"incomplete,\" we are invited to watch the poet robbed of his intent as unexpected words interrupt his texts, turning declaratives into interrogatives, questions into requests: \"would you leave (accidental) behind\"--each poem an apparent loop of closure, but one that signifies its \"failure\" or incompletion by ending, or starting over again, with its first [title] word. In part three, \"weightless,\" the poet frees the signifier from the weight of the signified. He brackets and strikes through what we think of as \"known\" in the \"real world\" that is always outside language, because it is [named].\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e What unifies or makes these four parts into a book are the personae the poet assigns to the lover: in the first as an intimate; in the second as an interruption of the determinative self--the other that brings us back to the self; in the third as an undefinable and thereby unattainable weightlessness; and finally as the gravitational pull of the landscape itself--all of them \"unfinished\" at the speaker's age, as the title of part four implies: \"[sex at thirty-eight] unfinished shield notes: letters to g.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49637853757713,"sku":"GOR012852651","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697267282193,"sku":"NGR9780889226050","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52690455298321,"sku":"NLS9780889226050","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0889226059.jpg?v=1750705161"},{"product_id":"on-beauty-book-rob-mclennan-9781772127690","title":"On Beauty","description":"On Beauty is a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion. Composed with a poet's eye for detail and ear for rhythm, rob mclennan's brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into intimate fragments of the everyday. A welcome chronicle of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50886804472081,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50886806077713,"sku":"NGR9781772127690","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1772127698.jpg?v=1751247229"},{"product_id":"book-of-smaller-book-rob-mclennan-9781773852614","title":"The Book of Smaller","description":"Written while at home full-time with two small children under five, the book of smaller is a collection of short, sharp, incredibly dense prose poems. Created in moments snatched from chaos, these poems challenge the possibilities of language in very small spaces. Each poem is a still moment, a memory, a burst of observation, suspended outside time and held up to the light as the world whirls around it. Some are intimate, some are public, all are grounded personal, domestic space. With trademark intelligence and daring, rob mclennan uses radical structures to express the concision and disorientation, jumps in sense and mood, the collapse of time and duration, the shattering joy and powerful fears, of full-person, full-time parenthood.   With an unparalleled knowledge of modern poetry and poetic evolution, mclennan breaks the sentence into its most vital pieces, then breaks it further, smashes punctuation out of the expected into spaces of risk and uncertainty, pushing conventions to the edge and then beyond to challenge what writing is, and what a reader can be.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51051606049041,"sku":"NIN9781773852614","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52454225772817,"sku":"NLS9781773852614","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1773852612.jpg?v=1763481583"},{"product_id":"missing-persons-book-rob-mclennan-9781551281438","title":"Missing Persons","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51326055285009,"sku":"CIN1551281430VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1551281430.jpg?v=1751244276"},{"product_id":"perimeter-book-rob-mclennan-9781554201280","title":"A Perimeter","description":"Poetry. A new child, a new house, a new neighbourhood: rob mclennan takes the measure of his environment in A PERIMETER, a collection of shorter and longer pieces from 2010 to 2014. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A PERIMETER is built around three longer works: the serial Alta Vista Poem; A perimeter, a survey of the poet's new surroundings (the suburbs and countryside around his Ottawa home), and A Rose Concordance, surrounding the first three months of his daughter, Rose. Interspersed are shorter poems reflecting on other aspects of mclennan's domestic and civilian life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51662577107217,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51662577926417,"sku":"CIN1554201284G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1554201284.jpg?v=1751309302"},{"product_id":"book-of-sentences-book-rob-mclennan-9781773856483","title":"The Book of Sentences","description":"Fantastically rooted in the local and in the family, the book of sentences captures small, quiet, and intimate domestic moments with snippets of grammar lightly held to themselves by lineation and punctuation. These poems move quickly, processing the wonder of the everyday with careful observation, speculation, memory, citation, and play.   Radically and everywhere metalingual, the book of sentences builds on mclennan's previous meditation on domestic joys, the book of smaller and the work of other poets while naming its own writing in the vocabulary of linguistics. It proceeds in a family tuned series of adjustments, amendings, resistances, and acceptances, reflecting on parenthood, childhood, family far and near, the past, the present, and the future.   With finesse of phrase and rhythm, patience and savouring of the moment, and care for nuance and association, rob meclennan shares work that is meditative, witty, humorous, and tender. Conjuring a special sense of immediacy, the book of sentences affirms the wonder and pleasure of everyday life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51699507921169,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51699508314385,"sku":"NGR9781773856483","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52725099692305,"sku":"NIN9781773856483","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1773856480.jpg?v=1760781228"},{"product_id":"book-of-sentences-book-rob-mclennan-9781773856476","title":"The Book of Sentences","description":"Fantastically rooted in the local and in the family, the book of sentences captures small, quiet, and intimate domestic moments with snippets of grammar lightly held to themselves by lineation and punctuation. These poems move quickly, processing the wonder of the everyday with careful observation, speculation, memory, citation, and play.   Radically and everywhere metalingual, the book of sentences builds on mclennan’s previous meditation on domestic joys, the book of smaller and the work of other poets while naming its own writing in the vocabulary of linguistics. It proceeds in a family tuned series of adjustments, amendings, resistances, and acceptances, reflecting on parenthood, childhood, family far and near, the past, the present, and the future.   With finesse of phrase and rhythm, patience and savouring of the moment, and care for nuance and association, rob meclennan shares work that is meditative, witty, humorous, and tender. Conjuring a special sense of immediacy, the book of sentences affirms the wonder and pleasure of everyday life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51699518112017,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51699518341393,"sku":"NGR9781773856476","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52608337936657,"sku":"NIN9781773856476","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1773856472.jpg?v=1760781014"},{"product_id":"harvest-book-rob-mclennan-9780889224551","title":"harvest","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor rob mclennan, poetry is a way of seeing, and what is seen in \u003ci\u003eharvest\u003c\/i\u003e: a book of signifiers is always a landscape as it inhabits the poet and his various personae. In the absence of capital letters, with only minimalist punctuation, and with a denial of the possessive case, (all formal signifiers of precedence and ownership), these poems do not appropriate the landscapes of their gaze, but rather liberate them.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e What is harvested here are the signifiers for journeys: tickets, postcards, letters--recording unseemly haste, enforced idleness, losing one's way, and sometimes finding it again. All coloured in the deceptive hues of a populist and egalitarian style, these poems are allowed to signify their own powerful and at times devastating ambiguities, from \"a magic more elusive than any spell she whispered\" to \"the salt waste left by the flood, where no seed grows.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e the present is a small thing \u0026amp; moves very fast\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e in the same river, which as they say,\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e moves. it takes\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u0026amp; takes \u0026amp; takes. a polaroid\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e too long\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e to develop.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52672134381841,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52672135069969,"sku":"NLS9780889224551","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889224551.jpg?v=1762293992"},{"product_id":"snow-day-book-rob-mclennan-9781963908589","title":"Snow day","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52675875995921,"sku":"NLS9781963908589","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52758228304145,"sku":"NIN9781963908589","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781963908589.jpg?v=1762340899"},{"product_id":"richard-brautigan-ahhhhhhhhhhh-book-rob-mclennan-9780889224247","title":"The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh\u003c\/i\u003e covers the range of love, loss and learning that have made rob mclennan one of the most exciting young poets in Canada. The language of the poems, though thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this work--from the seventeenth century platonist mystics to what his companions on the poetry trail were writing at last night's soirée, a crowd of voices, asides, references, allusions and whispers is constantly pushing and expanding his line forward. marvellously self-taught in the school of poets, mclennan's work is refreshingly free of pretence and category. The impressive and exhaustive range of poets and writers with whom he has learned is simply there, in his work-present, in the current text, not absent in some far, or even near, distant past. This is the work of a young man who has paid his dues and done his homework. There is also a kind of subtle humour here, born of the care with which mclennan keeps his lines clear of the dead-ends of self-consciousness, allowing the language to free itself from the page, and to be heard as well as read.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52688809525521,"sku":"NLS9780889224247","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889224247.jpg?v=1762333872"},{"product_id":"glengarry-book-rob-mclennan-9780889226623","title":"Glengarry","description":"\u003cp\u003eComposed in three sections, \u003ci\u003eGlengarry\u003c\/i\u003e is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan's youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undisclosed to him.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In \"glengarry: open field (a postscripted journal)\" the poet discovers that \"the earth remembers every scratch \u0026amp; scar \u0026amp; step ever took, if you know where to look, how to ask in the way of assembling,\" and to ask those questions of the emotional and physical landscapes of one's youth is to discover that \"history is written by everything that history forgets\"; is \"to half-open a story of what no longer exists\"; to beg the question, \"is this memory or romanticism\"; to run the risk of becoming lost in the very attempt to reconstruct the elements of our past: \"there is always the fear here of looking more back than ahead.\" What mclennan finds on this quest is nothing more than \"a portable violence of heritage \u0026amp; secrets.\" What he discovers here, however, is that \"we all live in ­imagined boundaries,\" and that \"if the story exists, i am living the ­language of it.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The short reprise to his memory poem, \"whiskey jack,\" leads ­mclennan to ask: \"what am I filled with, this quiet \/ conspiratorial talk, this body \/ of open wilderness, painted trees \/ \u0026amp; a history that functions \/ without markers \/ save seasons.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Finally, in \"avalanche,\" the answer to mclennan's rhetorical ­question, \"where are you, heart?\" appears in both its lyric and its epic voices: \"the names of all my broken hearts are only names again\" and \"there is eventually a silence \/ there is history.\" Amidst this \"aesthetic of wonderful destruction\" each new poem is \"an illusion against destructive slide,\" because \"what else is human hope but momentarily borne.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52688833708305,"sku":"NLS9780889226623","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889226623.jpg?v=1762333926"},{"product_id":"what-s-left-book-rob-mclennan-9780889224988","title":"what's left","description":"\u003ci\u003ewhat's left\u003c\/i\u003e, a book in six related sections, presents us with cues and clues to the poet's compositional strategies. The first section, \"hazelnut,\" measures time as the unfolding life of space. It alludes to mclennan's long-term genealogy project, in which he discovers traces of the Sumerian flood, Etruscans, Icelanders, and Robert the Bruce hidden in \"Indian Lands,\" waiting to be discovered like \"gilded coffins in Egypt, undisturbed, as yet,\" along with other \"'ancient' remains, now 'decades-old,'\" of our more recent, cash-crop culture. This hopeful search for a unified thread of narrative continuity in our shared physical landscape is undermined by the road-poems of the book's second section, \"interim report,\" where the poet finds himself \"somewhere between love and madness,\" only to discover in the third section that the pursuit of a collective historical voice might well be merely a search for a little white li(n)e.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Section four, \"cooley's key,\" shifts the identity\/narrative search from the \"other\" to the \"self,\" with an ironic platonic toss of the active body in favour of its passive intentions: \"'he says in the old days, eh, all \/ they cared abt was sex \u0026amp; grades, eh, but now \/ all they care abt is grades ... where \/ has the ambition gone.\" Section five, \"paisley,\" dead-ends in an artfully constructed fractal barrage of global nostalgia: a series of endlessly over- and under-stated images of idealized neighbourhoods where lawns are cut with mullets and relationships are cut into periodic tables by intrusive punctuation. Finally in section six, we find \"what's left: coda,\" a return to the particulars of the poet's \"territory\": not a \"mighty oak from a tiny acorn grown,\" but a hazelnut thicket in which a multiplicity of voices is heard.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52690467488017,"sku":"NLS9780889224988","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889224988.jpg?v=1762337691"},{"product_id":"decalogue-book-rob-mclennan-9780978160135","title":"Decalogue","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDecalogue: ten Ottawa poets\u003c\/i\u003e is a poetry anthology edited by rob mclennan.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740752179473,"sku":"NIN9780978160135","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780978160135.jpg?v=1763484790"},{"product_id":"decalogue-2-book-rob-mclennan-9780978160142","title":"Decalogue 2","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With the response to \u003ci\u003eDecalogue: ten Ottawa poets\u003c\/i\u003e (2006), we decided to follow up with \u003ci\u003eDecalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers\u003c\/i\u003e. Because we are the capital city, Ottawa as a whole is often accused of having no identity of its own; instead, some of our strength comes from our transient nature, interacting with ideas larger and more multiple than a single base. Edited by rob mclennan, this collection features the work by Emily Falvey, Matthew Firth, Gabriela Goliger, Alison Gresik, John-James Ford, Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Nadine McInnis, rob mclennan and Ian Roy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53518302052625,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53518302511377,"sku":"NIN9780978160142","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780978160142.jpg?v=1778337205"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-rob-mclennan.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}