Conor Mc Donnell, "What We Know So Far Is..." (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

Mar 13, 2026

Conor Mc Donnell, a poet and pediatric physician at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, explores a long poem blending Irish roots, clinical life, and cultural history. He discusses language as evolving and weaponized. Short, cinematic sections riff on news anxiety, dark humor in medicine, editing into a unified long poem, and the poem’s shifting, chorus-like voices.

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INSIGHT

News Noise Creates Fragmented Understanding

Conor Mc Donnell framed the book around the repeated news phrase "what we know so far is" to show how fragmented, anxiety-producing headlines give us awareness without context.
He tracked real-time news and hospital alarms, then used that recurring phrase as a structural virus-like motif that mutates through the long poem.

ANECDOTE

Hospital Alarm As Daily Background

Conor recounts arriving at the hospital to an alarm announcing "cold blue in ICU," describing how workspaces begin screaming at you the moment you enter.
That lived experience influenced the book's sense of constant external alarm and emotional overload.

INSIGHT

Language Mutates Like A Cultural Virus

Mc Donnell argues language itself has become weaponized memes that mutate to increase division and reduce understanding.
He uses a prologue about viral mutation and repeated motifs so readers recognize phrases that shift meaning as they recur through the poem.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Conor Mc Donnell about his long poem, What We Know So Far Is...(Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter.

In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Mc Donnell has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural-genes.” Through it all runs Mc Donnell’s fascination with language, ever shifting, beguiling, mutating, virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Mc Donnell shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world.

Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current vice-president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society.

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