read an excerpt from The Ottawa City Project

hear an excerpt from Trevor Cole's Authors Aloud

view the Ottawa poetry newsletter's notes on geography

read the April 2007 Ottawa Citizen article on rob mclennan

review in Ottawa's XPress

The poems in this collection work to not only reflect the more conservative, even bureaucratic aspects of the city, but the myths of the city, and work through references and concerns that go completely against those myths, into their own stories, and into the realities of the city itself.

praise for what's left (2004)
For mclennan, borders fracture like water freezing in rock cracks; we are left with rubble - narrative unanswerable in its native state - that can only be combined and not fixed (repaired or made static).
            — ryan fitzpatrick, filling Station

praise for 33 lines, a stolen phrase & a short apology (2005)
mclennan has a great talent for combining clear, minimalist writing with the kind of exuberant, post-whatever excess that typifies so much of Canada’s “experimental” poetry.
            — Jonathan Ball, (in progress): a life

praise for aubade (2006)
mclennan at his best makes many other poets look like joyless self-censors.
            — Maurice Mierau, Winnipeg Free Press

Born in Ottawa in 1970 at the Grace Hospital on Wellington Street near Parkdale Avenue, rob mclennan currently lives 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, a novella with The Mercury Press, and a title for Vancouver publisher Arsenal Pulp Press, Ottawa: The Unknown City. He was recently named writer-in-residence for the University of Alberta for the 2007-8 academic year.

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