What We Know So Far Is …
Conor Mc Donnell
October 7, 2025
90 pages | ISBN 978-1-998408-26-9
The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter.
In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Mc Donnell has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural-genes.” Through it all runs Mc Donnell’s fascination with language, ever shifting, beguiling, mutating, virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Mc Donnell shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world.
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
About the Author
Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current vice-president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society. Conor works weekends at Sellers & Newel Second-Hand Books in Little Italy, Toronto, where they have words for people like him.