the book of sentences

Compiled over three years, the book of sentences deepens rob mclennan’s exploration of domestic life.

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.

rob mclennan is an editor, publisher, critic, and the author of more than fifty titles. John Newlove Poetry Award, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. He lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair.

Highly sophisticated and accomplished.

—dennis cooley

rob mclennan is one of the best prose and monostich poets writing today, in part because he works so attentively with the fragment, as a ceramic collage artist works with the smallest shards of porcelain.

—Han VanderHart