“World’s End, persuades you to give value and dignity of attention to where and when you are.”

Through eight extended poem-sections, World’s End, sits beyond the city’s gates, from relocating to an Ottawa suburb after a quarter century in Centretown, to the birth of the author’s third child. World’s End, examines the lyric across and beyond barriers, propelled by language and fueled by the pitter-patter of tiny feet. World’s End, is an opening.

“In the extended community of poets and poetry, mclennan is in good company. World’s End, ranges outward from a number of key twentieth-century works, including, among others, The Martyrology by bpNichol; A Poet’s Journal by George Seferis; and Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer.

Here, domestic life is focal to the work—the flesh of family, kinship, and childcare—as it informs and interrupts the poet writing toward the poem. Travel enters into the poem, too, as mclennan writes of this process: “Travel writing, I hate you. It suffers so much at the surface.” Throughout, the syntax of the poem modulates between taught angularity to a looser confessional narrative; yet the vitality of ménage remains central to mclennan’s poetry.

At times, mclennan’s poems act as a kind of soliloquy, or private declamation, overheard. Ultimately, mclennan’s poetry in World’s End, is made of the energy of domesticity, history, and quotation, as a kind of “conversion” from experience to text. Here, it is the lived encounter that fuels the event of the poem.”

—Mark Goldstein, author of Form of Forms (book*hug), Tracelanguage (book*hug), and After Rilke (book*hug).

“World’s End, by rob mclennan persuades you to give value and dignity of attention to where and when you are. The everyday is where we live, not in a rare moment. All moments are rare. “If you would pay for miracles to happen, how much for something ordinary?” (“The Key of Minor, Minor”).

These poems are spilled skittles, refusing the flattening effect of One Lyric Narrative. They are longing to not lose the sweet now (“Stem cells: pass this way again”) and to keep the magical acrobatics of walking on these waters. (“The most important part of any plan is revision.”)”

—Pearl Pirie, author of footlights (Radiant Press), and Lampman Award winner the pet radish, shrunken (book*hug).