I hear Gillian Conoley's voice as I read these poems; by voice, I mean her real & physical voice, its temperature, resistance & flirtatiousness. The poet's experience shapes these recent poems as much as the gorgeous yet quirky language that she has long been lauded for. Conoley says that the primary obsession in her work is perception, which, although true, perhaps downplays the vivid thoughtfulness everywhere evident in the poems themselves. She stares America right in the face & stares it down with lines such as these:

"We could unfold and try once more to open/ a language in which we do not do/ most of the killing"
& "We could all take off our skulls and stare into them" ("an oh a sky a fabric an undertow")

"with patience I can sit on this bench// and wait for the ironworks of a previous century/ to reverse themselves// . . . . time to move along/ it's pathos time" ("The Patient")

"What are we to the man/ who attacked the gunman/ as he started to reload, a constituency?" ("Opened")

"we were thinking a lot about the feminine/ we were putting our feminine in a suitcase" ("Plath and Sexton")

"it was morning and all the white guilt got balled up/ and tossed through the sky then landed back/ into the white guilt which had made a very good deal with the white privilege" ("Monday Morning")

"I didn't want my eyes to be/ my reality negator" ("Begins") ( )