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City of words by rob mclennan

rob mclennan

sky delta - Denise Enck
sky delta – D. Enck

City of words

All the galaxies we see have a number.
Sarah Lang, For Tamara

Singlet. Does not wish to. Hardened. Alone is not the page. Breathe rapidly, and nuclear. Articulate. Torrential surf. It matters, how. A yawning memory. When very young, I spoke. Confuse fresh puddles with the motion, air. A single robin. Suddenly. But the clouds. In the desert, I can see such facts. We tend the city, garden. Seed. Be like the pronoun: begun. What are you saying. Internalize terrain. Bit-map. Thinking finishes. You sense the rain: a pressure scent, or barometric push. Rinse, repeat. Repeat. A pitch of drywall. We scale the distance.

rob mclennan

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. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, 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. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is Interviews Editor at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. 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

Author: rob mclennan Tags: poetry, rob mclennan Category: Poetry August 4, 2015

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Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

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