the uncertainty principle

In his first collection of short stories, rob mclennan’s The Uncertainty Principle uses not a single wasted word to explore history, contemporary culture, human relationships, and the ways in which we live. His microfictions highlight our most important moments and biggest stories in the tiniest of spaces. Small novels and even smaller stories are all written in dense, packed prose. Carve, slowly. Carve further, even slower. Pause. Listen.

AUTHOR

Rob McLennan

rob mclennan is a poet, essayist, editor, reviewer, and blogger based in Ottawa. He has been published by many of Canada’s most prestigious publishers and he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. He is also the editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. His writing is grounded using language in fresh ways to discover, clarify, and understand the world and his surroundings. He does “not wish to remain still.” mclennan is the author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, as well as over one hundred chapbooks of poetry and fiction. He has been twice long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was awarded Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award and the John Newlove Poetry Award.

Reviews

“Imagine a venn diagram, with one circle labelled “Stories” and another labelled “Poetry” and yet another labelled “The Journal from an Imagined Life” and where the circles intersect, you would have The Uncertainty Principle. Each story, and thus each page, is a surprise, a discovery, and a reminder that art exists in even the smallest nooks and crannies.”—Arjun Basu

“You will come to realize, as you read this book, that there are things that happened here before you ever arrived, things that are impossible to verify, things that will forever remain impossible to verify. I never know what I might find when I read a book by rob. These little stories are hard to talk about. They almost insist that you don’t talk about them. You can only really repeat what rob has already managed. Like a yacht on a sandy hill in Idaho, this book is just a wonderful, useless thing.”—Ken Sparling

“The brevity of rob mclennan’s stories is deceiving. Hugely original, enticing and satisfying, his jigsaw of popular culture and classic events, intersecting lives we never imagined, is poetic, as only a poet can write them. “There are ghosts set along every journey,” he says, and his writing embraces them all, capturing the essence of the change we have endured.”—Anik See