Notes from the Passenger
May 2023, Nightboat Books
PRAISE
Gillian Conoley’s NOTES FROM THE PASSENGER reads as if written “in an aura of intimacy,” intimacy with the daughter, the lover, the reader, the dead, and with the spirit, sometimes called God, sometimes called “the messenger.” In wide-open poems that expose the junk and the beauty of the material world, the violence and the grace within the social, Conoley embraces “mortality . . . with its rosy edge of want” while catapulting toward the infinite, what she calls the next next world.
––Julie Carr
Future twin of Saint Perpetua, Gillian Conoley is our timely passenger listening lustily for messages from perpetuity. In these vibrating, visionary poems, the dead speak as the future speaks and “at all times the time/between technologies drips.” Perpetual font of a “know-not wisdom, Conoley channels data into myth and myth into an algorithm, gathering our resources so that we get ever-ready for what’s to come.
––Aditi Machado
Gillian Conoley writes visionary Americana, her signature vernacular abstraction picking up lyric signals from the Invisible. Attuned to the intrinsic revelations of apocalypse, NOTES FROM THE PASSENGER registers the increased “vibratory qualities” of our especially troubled times. Written from within “the aura of intimacy awaiting the message/between birth and personhood,” a counterpoint to “death’s evensong,” these poems offer good company on our way to the Next, destination unknown. I wouldn’t want to travel with anyone else.
—Brian Teare
Gillian Conoley is that rare poet that combines the sensibility of a phenomenologist with that of an archeologist. Alongside masters like Leslie Scalapino, Harryette Mullen, Susan Howe, Conoley omnivorously draws from compositional techniques of painting, cinematography, and music creation. NOTES FROM THE PASSENGER showcases Conoley’s uncanny ability to develop sub-topical themata into the grand themes that call to us in our historic epoch: What is true? What is agency? What, in fact, constitutes the living?
––Rodrigo Toscano
Recent reviews: “These poems reverberate with ‘susurration and aftershock’ from the intersecting devastations and violences of the modern world. Whether looking skyward or from within dreamscapes, the speaker remains bound to the quotidian: cracked IPhones, pilling T-shirts, AK 47s, and conditions “unseasonably hot amid goose scat.” Linguistically flexible and pointed, the poet circles inevitability, when “all the dead arrive in skeins . . .” Conoley engages the materiality of words, at times playfully riffing and dreaming in allusions.”
Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Books, The Poetry Foundation
Sonically alive, as empire and climate fall into catastrophe, these poems open portals where the living and the dead find one another.
From Shelley Memorial Award Winner Gillian Conoley, Notes from the Passenger reminds us how with increased gun violence, war, plague, white supremacy, we are no longer “in control.” We are no longer drivers; we are passengers—destination unknown. Arriving like missives from a bardic journey, these poems explore how system collapse has led to a new space-time continuum. These cinematic, linguistically vibrant poems seek new order beyond division, within catastrophe and joy, written on the edge of being.