Notes from the Passenger

"If our world, material and familiar, is broken and harmful, almost dead and gone, then Gillian Conoley’s Notes from the Passenger imagines our world miraculously transmogrified—navigable, accommodating, and hospitable through lyric insight. Fractalled images and mythic characters engage in a kind of playful dialogue that is dead serious about its assemblage and precise in its amplitudes." 

—Emily Simon, Rain Taxi

"The collection’s title captures its duality: we follow the journey of the 'passenger,' while the act of note-taking—reliant on layers of language—remains at the surface. Conoley engages the materiality of words, at times playfully riffing and dreaming in allusions"

—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Books

"Notes from the Passenger is strewn with the visceral gifts of the quotidian, like one’s beloved and dirty dishes splayed in the sink after a good meal, all counterweights to the book’s cosmic bent. . . devastatingly beautiful." 

—Joseph Byrd, antiphony

"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 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."

—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