subverting the lyric

One of the most prolific and engaged book reviewers in Canada over the past
fifteen years, Ottawa writer rob mclennan has slowly been moving into longer
forms, producing essays on the works of such diverse Canadian writers as
George Bowering, Jon Paul Fiorentino, jwcurry, Margaret Christakos, and Barry
McKinnon. subverting the lyric: essays works through mclennan's years of
writing, thinking, and blogging through literature, as reader, writer,
performer, editor, critic, reviewer, and just plain fan of the art. In these
fifteen pieces, mclennan writes about travel, Canadian poets in general - and
some very specifically - as well as his own investigations of the writer's
craft. Together, they remap our literary and linguistic landscape, "the
contours, rifts, subductions, tectonic plates of the medium in which we
exist," inscribing a poetics of geography, process, and culture that is at
once strikingly new and refreshingly communal. The breadth of mclennan's take
on Canadian poetry, alone, is remarkable: his ability to reconcile the
concerns, successes, and failures of both the "mainstream" and the "fringe" of
our literature urges - and begins - a critical overhaul that's been long
overdue.