Advance Praise
“Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … is a brilliant tangle of lyrics and logos, a wild simulacrum of the poet’s thoughts about a ‘haptic universe’ – one we can perceive through the body, one that we can feel. This long poem is equally concerned with thought and feeling, with biology and memes, with the murmuration of birds and the susurration of words we whisper silently to ourselves but that we wish for others to hear. In the hunt for things unseen, and in the placing of lines on paper, sometimes beautiful, sometimes fantastical, sometimes contradictory, Mc Donnell’s epic looks beyond the wasteland of human existence and recalibrates not just our relationship to language, but also to nature, and to ourselves.” – Chris Banks, author of Alternator and Deepfake Serenade
“What We Know So Far Is … a book of vocal assemblings and disassemblings. Equipped with a brilliantly expansive set of cultural allusions, Mc Donnell gets his hands deep beneath the superficiality of language, and then he just starts twisting. The result is a challenging book, eager to press and interrogate. But it’s also an improbably joyful one as the poet uncovers new ideas in the folding and unfolding words as he quests for their sharper historical cores. This is a book that poses ample questions, and while the answers are elusive, it is positively giddy about the chase.” – Jacob McArthur Mooney, author of Frank’s Wing and The Northern
“An electric current runs through this poem and part of the speaker’s challenge is to ‘isolate silence first.’ Edgy and vast, grounded in body, in biology, in physics, this poem stretches the dimensions of life and death confronting the line between. What We Know So Far Is … a visionary, kaleidoscopic cry.” – Catherine Graham, author of Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead
“McDonnell mines late-modernism to give us this stream-of-consciousness epic, in the tradition of TS Eliot and JH Prynne, that is at once lyrical and abstract, formal yet playful.” –James Lindsay, author of Only Insistence and Double Self-Portrait
“Blending references to medicine and zombie movies, to Donnie Darko and anatomy, to internet meme culture and the musicality of Radiohead, Joy Division and the Pixies, What We Know So Far Is … asks us to consider both the power and futility of words in connecting us – to our past and future selves, to each other, and to the earth.” – Paola Ferrante, author of Her Body Among Animals
