What We Know So Far Is…
In an 80-page long poem, Conor Mc Donnell thrust me through multiple dimensions of contemplation of existence like a baptism. His transparency and human grit felt like a cleansing, a stripping away of the illusions and constructs that society has boxed us in. Published by Wolsak & Wynn, What We Know So Far Is… is a microscopic navigation into the mind of the writer, both validating and affirming in spiritual and cognitive scope.
In an interview with “Writing in The Woodlot,” Mc Donnell speaks to the depths he plunged into when drafting What We Know So Far Is…. “I knew I wanted to pour everything into a piece of art that hit the earth like a meteor.” During writing, Mc Donnell “dove headlong into a sea of language, mutations, memes, wordplay, Irish vocabulary and historical disasters and thrashed about for a year and a half. ... [He] read Paradise Lost, The Odyssey, and, most importantly, Ciaràn Carson’s translations of Dante’s Inferno, and the old Irish epic song, The Tàin.” These literary allusions permeate the work, but Mc Donnell’s professional medical background informs his writing as well. In layering scientific language and ideas the complexity and breadth of What We Know So Far Is… conveys a message of questioning existence, a mainstream existence that at times feels like a simulation or false matrix.
Thirty numbered poems titled with Roman numerals are presented in fragments that comprise the long poem. These numbered poems are placed with nine numbered short poems that form a longer poem that weave in with the other thirty poems. Six pages of endnotes follow the poetry that give context and deepen understanding of literary influences that informed Mc Donnell’s writing. “This book is influenced by anything and everything I have consciously/unconsciously soaked up through most if not all of my sentience to date.” And in that sponging of the world around him, Mc Donnell offers contemplations that, to me, cleansed and released. The reader observes a seeking, in turn, the reader journeys too.
There is no table of contents, instead, we are given two pages covered with vertical lines. There are whorls of broken lines on both pages that cut through the vertical linearity. Right after, the reader ventures into the prologue. “In order to construct the ‘next’ dimension up, we are restricted by the boundaries of the ‘current.’” I wonder, how will this work break these boundaries?
I fall into a poetic jargon. “A communicant viral biome pervades and inhabits everything.” I acknowledge the matrix. I acknowledge more to life than what meets some eyes. “They enter the host to subtly alter in order to foster trans-species communication.” Is Mc Donnell going there? “In some circumstances the host cannot support the geometry of altered language, nor can it tolerate the dissonance foist upon its internal inaudible hum: such is one way toward inevitable ‘madness,’ intolerance manifest through the host’s inability to communicate effectively with ‘their own kind,’ now they straddle the syntax of more than one species.” The existence of multiple species stenciling over simultaneously, or digging in. “Vocabulary remains mostly recognizable, but the use to which it is put cannot be understood by those who exist beyond its boundaries, nor can we calibrate current audiology to decipher what is otherwise perceived as ramblings, flights of fancy, pressure of ideas and supposed elusions.” There it is, the fine line between consciousness and madness. “We cannot calibrate so instead we medicate.” We medicate to conform, to obey. “We can’t measure and frame because of an inability to contain the accepted definition of a dimension, in this case the viral dimension- pioneers of which are influencers, algorithmic investors, ill-fated savants and those silent auto-ummunocompromiseds.” Mc Donnell writes about current social media existences. Both slavery to the machine and sometimes the only way we can push back if we expand beyond simple planes of ‘dimension.’ Then, there comes the first dropping of the title that will repeat throughout the collection, “What We Know So Far Is….”
What do we know so far, really?
We know that Mc Donnell got tired of writing within certain perimeters. In an interview with Narrative Based Medicine, Mc Donnell confesses, “I think there is a particular kind of poet (again) who is bored by writing the small poems, year after year, and they hunger to do something different.” That is what What We Know So Far Is…, something done differently, most definitely. Fearing a frontier of apathy in 2021 and 2022, Mc Donnell “began to collect little vignettes that bothered [him].” Thus, this collecting began to take shape.
A diagnosis of a world gone astray, Mc Donnell describes it as an examination of his ‘scry world.’ “I worried at times I was losing my grip on sanity: grief, insomnia, anxiety and drug toxicity will do that to a man. I held on desperately, withdrew from social media and society, I had three lifelines: my wife, my work (day-job), my writing. That’s how (and why) I kept going.”
And in keeping on through adversity, Mc Donnell pieced together a poetry collection.
Poignantly, he confesses in this interview that he feared even reading this poetry collection outloud in public. He lost sleep thinking about it. My impression of this collection is that the message is necessary for our society, the unceasing questioning and intelligence of the way Mc Donnell can blend meaning contributes to a valuable critical reading of the world we are trying to force ourselves to live in.
A staff anesthesiologist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine at the University of Toronto, Mc Donnell is also the author of two poetry collections as well as three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in Canadian and international publications, including the medical journals JAMA and CMAJ, where the boundaries between clinical observation and poetic attention become permeable. After completing the University of Toronto School for Continuing Studies Creative Writing Program in 2015, he began publishing poetry in 2016, followed by his first chapbook in 2017 and his first collection in 2021. What We Know So Far Is…, extends a literary practice shaped by his dual commitment to medicine and writing.
That intersection is equally evident in Mc Donnell’s professional life. As a funded researcher in pediatric hospital safety, medication error, and opioid stewardship, he works within systems where precision can have profound human consequences. Further, his role as editor-in-chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication, reflects his commitment to restoring the patient’s voice to medical narratives. He is also a frequent international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care and error prevention and serves as Vice-President of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesiology Society. Yet alongside these considerable medical responsibilities is a distinctly literary life.
Buckrider Books, the poetry and fiction imprint of Hamilton’s Wolsak & Wynn, is a fitting home for What We Know So Far Is …. Founded as an imprint for work that refuses easy categorization, Buckrider describes itself as its ‘outlaw imprint,’ publishing books that are stylistically daring and socially challenging. That ethos is evident in Mc Donnell’s long poem. This text deliberately resists the compactness often associated with lyric poetry, instead joining the tradition of the Canadian long poem while pursuing its own wild associative logic.
Texts that I have encountered with Buckrider Books are experimental poets like Kyle Flemmer and Whitney French, whose Supergiants and Syncopation likewise challenge conventional relationships between form, science and narrative. Mc Donnell’s collection feels at home among these books because it treats poetry not as a tidy lyric object but as a space where disparate forms of knowledge can collide. In this sense, Buckrider’s commitment to books that ‘refuse to conform’ becomes almost a description of Mc Donnell’s method itself.
“Know so far,” writes Mc Donnell, “this is not a revisionist work as much as a work of reclamation.” The text ends with the image of an object, a palimpsest, and in the right bottom corner is the writing, “This is what it is not.” An answer to the title, Mc Donnell explains in the endnotes, “This is what it is not- a palimpsest- all of What We Know So Far Is……written over itself.” Written over, erased, scraped down, then written over again. Traces remain of former narratives. A faded parchment. But, this is what it is not, a palimpsest. Perhaps the former narratives remain, or something else, something entirely new is presented.
The last pages mirror the front pages. The vertical lines. The broken-lined whorls that disrupt the page. On the final page is the outline of a falling man. He is entering the vortex of a whorl. This man on the back pages is an inversion of the figure of a falling man on the front cover. There could be a burn through the book straight into the perfect position of this falling. As we do too, we fall through this book.
A portal.
A rabbit hole.
A collapse of dimensions.
Thank you to Conor Mc Donnell, Buckrider Books and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.
