Four poems for pioneertown.

1.

A ramshackle estate
set on bone. Hidden, within

and around the body. This
steam is definitive: trains

across stagecoach, a pantoum
of Spanish, names lost

on the causeway.

2.

Speak not of nostalgia. A knitting pattern
of another clan’s

centuries.

3.

@SashaDugdale writes: Everyone
has a favourite bluebell wood – where

is yours? I invent
a machine. Stretch out

in particles, the line
of a fragment.

4.

Dina Del Bucchia tweets: I still
have five jobs. This game

is terrible.

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 Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2019). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics(ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). 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.

© 2020