THIS INSISTENT LIST
This Insistent List is that rarest of things in poetry: a sequel. Taking up where his first collection, Recovery Community, left off, physician-poet Conor Mc Donnell races into an all-too plausible near future, one where science has fought and lost the great battle over data, language & truth. Through shifting perspectives and innovative form, Mc Donnell delivers a new collection of unique voice & character albeit through the cracked lens that is already a trademark of his work. His is a weird, barely recognizable song yet one that encourages we move forward through darkness pain and uncertainty to emerge to discovery that poem & song are the greatest and last of our secret weapons.
RECOVERY COMMUNITY
Praise for Recovery Community
The poems in Conor Mc Donnell’s debut collection are remarkable not only for what they say, but also for what they do. This is language that reminds us of our bodies in all their shocked resilience and visceral fragility, that reconnects us to one another by revealing how the bonds and distances between us are yet another form of syntax. These poems demonstrate how language itself is a material substance, deeper than ink and sound waves, that can weigh upon us, create walls, or form the foundation of a new and unknown world. In Recovery Community, Mc Donnell has given us another instrument to help us mend and go on.
—Paul Vermeersch
The voice of Conor Mc Donnell is sorrowing, injured, enraged, and caught in its own almost powerless benevolence. He belongs to a growing group of poets—a number of them, like himself, doctors—who register us as entrapped in worldwide chemical and technological sterility: addiction, and spectacle devoted to propaganda and injustice. For “addicts / cannot wash off the law / deaf as it is to poverty”. Then what can a doctor, or anyone, do? Dream of death and human wastage, and then wake to confront them: “help her sit in soothing light search for bugs she swears are there”. And what can a poet do? He waits, in Mc Donnell’s lovely, haggard lines, for “this anger to form / something more than outrage”, while attending to “a silent scrum of murder / and beauty in empty featureless streets.”
—A. F. Moritz
IN THE MUSEUM
How a poem looks on the page is important to me. In the Museum is a ‘pandemic chapbook’ dealing with lost, abandoned or not yet realized museum exhibits. Each poem has a formal structure and shape that mark an obituary of sorts for that which brought us contemporary comforts: culture, music, art, film, photography, etc - most of which are to be found In the Museum, that building we ignore for most of our lives but which over time has served as sanctuary for many a lost and hungry soul. But what if the museum could no longer differentiate between visitor and virus? If we stopped turning up one day, what would happen to the museum? Would it slowly give way to the weeds and wolves? Or go mad in the process, like the protagonist in so many ‘last man on earth’ scenarios?
Please note that the Buy button will redirect you to the Bloggiverse of Rob McLennan’s Above/Ground Press, publisher of In The Museum.
SAFE SPACES
Safe Spaces is my second chapbook and was published by the no longer with us, Frog Hollow Press. Safe Spaces predates Recovery Community by some 3 years and while a few poems made it into Recovery Community, Safe Spaces contains many poems not available elsewhere.
Like The Book of Retaliations, Safe Spaces also sold out its print run and due to the retirement of Frog Hollow Press is unlikely to enter a second printing. For those completists among you who simply must know more, Safe Spaces can be borrowed here …
https://bac-lac.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1017902790?lang=en&q=BINDER
THE BOOK OF RETALIATIONS
The Book of Retaliations, my first chapbook, was published in 2016 by Anstruther Press. It is a collection of concrete / visual poems which formed part of my final thesis in the University of Toronto SCS Creative Writing Program. The visual nature of the poems is accentuated by the beautiful (and tactile if you find one) cover designed by Erica Smith. Book of Retaliations sold out its first print run, however, 3 poems are to be included in the upcoming anthology, The Anstruther Reader, which celebrates ten years of limited edition chapbooks and broadsides.