Conor Mc Donnell's What We Know So Far Is...

Reviewed by Steven Mayoff

(Buckrider Books, 2025)

​Dr. Conor Mc Donnell divides his time between medicine, as a physician at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and being a published poet, now with three full-length books and three chapbooks to his credit. Perhaps it is fitting then that his newest book What We Know So Far Is… deftly lays its linguistic self out as a hybrid of diagnosis, dithyramb, and unfolding diorama.
 
The title sounds very much like something a doctor might say to a patient who is waiting for definitive news on their condition, while also evoking a news anchor reporting on a late-breaking story as the facts are still coming in. Mc Donnell seems to switch effortlessly between both roles.
 
If Burroughs would have us believe that language is a virus, then between the covers of Mc Donnell’s novella-length opus language has indeed gone viral, in all senses of that word’s current usage:

Murmuration, unleashed by the throng, prays high in beams above: swoops & swoons over sacristy, lording over the gathered beneath, deftly sculpting angle of descent
anger of dissent
angst of decency
angelic deception on auto-repent.

The work defies any attempt at encapsulation, as it careers in bone-rattling fashion forward, backward, and then suddenly scatters to all of our dimension’s ten directions, often at the same time. Mc Donnell cleverly employs common techniques, such as repetition, to great effect, most notably using the book’s title, which gives the ongoing prognosis a hopeful sense of despair:

What We Know So Far Is the first steps to madness
 —manifest as ill-communication with kin— 
quickly slip into species-specific syntax:
even when vocab regains recognition the filter-ware crashes for lack of new phrasings.

Another repeated technique is mining unusual connections to words, uniquely creating plurals by placing an s at the beginnings of words:

prayer is no longer a port, its plural is sport. nothing outlasts suffering. no jewel trumps pain, no magic holds mutation hobbled mid-flight turning memes into sunken statues. underwater mothers merge as choral reefs to aspirate gas from ghoulish hearts to bind wounds on souls of our feet to churn us to death in our sleep. stings are plucked like death yanks cures from theories, redacts remedies, pockets keys to the apothecary. the plural of cure is skewer.

The best advice I could give any reader of this book is the same advice I’d give any reader of all poetry. Read it out loud as much as you can. There is meaning in the mayhem. Mc Donnell uses everything at his disposal, from pop culture references to mythological allusions, creating a context that sometimes makes them one and the same. He offers translations from other languages, most notably Gaelic, and weaves stream-of-consciousness inventions, often slyly adding parentheses to single words—having them divide amoeba-like inwardly—to create two meanings in one. Mc Donnell’s body politic is a virulent drop of water on the glass slide of our current collective consciousness. While his sense of humour can be crude, it often feels like it’s meant to evoke the kind of laughter that keeps one from crying:

Instead of letting me geek it the chicken shoves its head in my mouth and pecks at my tongue. “Bite down,” I always swore to myself, “I’ll bite down if a cock is ever shoved in my mouth.”

On the whole, readers are left to their own devices to make head or tail of what can sometimes feel like subconscious meandering with emerging moments of brilliance and insight that make the journey worthwhile. What We Know So Far Is… is in itself a journey that knows no destination except for its moment-by-moment existence.
​
And while that cynical bone that exists in each of us might want to advise Dr. Mc Donnell to heal thyself, if you will only allow his words to sit in your consciousness awhile, you may discover in yourself the compassion to ask: Physician, where does it hurt? And I’ll be damned for all eternity if the answer isn’t Nowhere and Everywhere.

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Steven Mayoff is a Canadian novelist, poet and lyricist living in rural Prince Edward Island. His fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in literary journals and blogs across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. His most recent book is the revised edition of his poetry collection, Swinging Between Water and Stone (Galleon Books, 2025). His website is www.stevenmayoff.ca