“At the end of January 2018 I sat in a coffee shop sipping a tea I couldn’t afford and reflected on the last month I barely survived. This exercise became a monthly meditation on time passing, what it’s like to live in a body, as a self, something holy, a wrong turn.” This introduction to Melissa Conway’s debut collection Sundog (Fruit Salad Co) gives us a preview (and a gentle content warning) of their three-year project.
Sundog is a catalog, not unlike efforts of other poets, to document daily gratitude or seasonal changes. In it, Conway tracks three years of reflection and recovery in a collection that is, perhaps accidentally, also documenting their own coming-of-age.
The interesting feature of this catalog is that it is almost chronological — but not quite. Three years of Januarys are followed by three years of Februarys, and so on. If you read each poem in perfect chronology the narrative is a hard swerve away from the one we get in Conway’s order but you witness a slow blossoming of identity. In the proper order — the one Conway intended — readers see cycles.
We, as the audience, are bearing witness to trends and times that we maybe didn’t notice when they were happening. Similar to how holidays’ recurrence tend to cause reflection on that same date a year prior. I remember March 2020 so I remember March 2019 so I remember March 2018. In retrospect, we give these dates significance.
Conway’s strengths are highlighted in their most restrained and in their most lawless, for example, in the poem “Moonshire”: “we are at once / beer-in-water-bottles and diesel / sunburn and freerange laughter echoing / up to the orangeglow predawn screen.” In “Marrow Song,” the poem spans a two-page spread, an it’s unclear if we are to read from left to right across both pages or just one. The tight and inconsistent spacing causes the reader to struggle through it — as intended, surely, as the poem repeats phrases including “caught between claws,” “it’s killing me” and “am I already over.”
Conway’s most powerful work focuses on the body, jamming words together to create new figures of speech. At its weakest it’s still special — a note passed between classes, folded into a tight origami diamond, and saved. It’s interesting and uncommon to watch a writer’s growth in real time, an act that is bold and in line with the collection’s eventual message: “there is so / much of me.” At some points, Conway thinks they are too much, at others they say this with appreciation.
Watching the passage of time through these poems offers a lesson in poetic form from a talented student, straddling the line between strict skill and total vulnerability. The result of these reflections in mixed chronology (and phrases like “stone shocked water”) is a startling elegy for the self and an ode to cycles.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2023 issue.