Notes from the Passenger

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 drip[s].” 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.

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.

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?