new from above/ground press: Twenty-one stories, by rob mclennan

Twenty-one stories,
rob mclennan
$5

~

In a television interview, the filmmaker we both admire mentions how she never uses bookmarks. She has always been able to remember the last page she read of any book, and is constantly baffled by the inability of others to do the same. She glances, distractedly, behind her as she says this, somewhere off-camera, in the direction of the studio floor. What might she be looking at? Her films are like distances we have yet to reach, capable of articulating broad silences. When so many others are unable to comprehend that silence has a language at all. 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as part of above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
September 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. He is the author of three works of fiction—white (Mercury Press, 2007), Missing Persons (Mercury Press, 2009) and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014)—as well as two collections of literary essays, a tourist guide to Ottawa and more than two dozen full-length poetry titles, the most recent of which include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with the book of smaller forthcoming in 2022 from University of Calgary Press. He won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour.

He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

He is currently working on, among other projects, a novel.

This is mclennan’s sixty-third above/ground press chapbook, following Poems for Lunch Poems for SFU (2020), Somewhere in-between / cloud (2019), Study of a fox (2018), snow day (2018) and It’s still winter (2017). These stories are part of the work-in-progress “Little arguments: stories,” a manuscript that follows a thread begun in The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com