Notes from the Passenger

“I errand to fill my hole,” says the speaker of Gillian Conoley’s latest book, Notes from the Passenger. The speaker’s consciousness drifts from war—“I was born after a war / came of age in a war”—to James Joyce and Jane Eyre, from primeval mist to mortality, to observing her daughter in the car with her: “You scroll and want worlds the many worlds of wanting worlds.”

These poems reverberate with “susurration and aftershock” from the intersecting devastations and violences of the modern world. Whether looking skyward or from within dream landscapes, 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,” asking:

                                how do the infected dead
feel about the natural dead
                        —and the murdered
dead—no time for that—

Juxtapositions dissolve boundaries between the natural world and humanity’s latest inventions: “clouds return to break into hawk shadow, Venmo,” and people are imagined as “small godlings […] walking around with         our weak connections       and melted chords.” While these poems eschew linearity, they remain direct in their critiques. The poem “I loved, I voted,” features a “fatigued member of the populace,” while “The White House” lands on “We people, who cease to be useful.” Where “[i]n agitation along sleep’s surface / dreams the monster,” the waking world bears its own monsters, “the weariness of fearing a man in the dark.” Here, “the women weep because they have been violated / and not for the first time,” and the me-too moment is shown to be age-old:

Storying all night and dead asleep all day Scheherazade said

she did not want to finish when what she meant was

stay, I am a spirit just coffining up his dream timer.

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:

This wake, sleep, this wake sleep sea

the planet

and its lost parts

lay plow to the furrow

dream a little dream

with me