Confined to a hospital bed, a rattling mind stuck within a thwarted body discovers that to be an “I” is to be several, ‘municipal’, as Dillon has it. ‘Not alone, not alone, not alone.’ They — we, actually — are the ventilator keeping us breathing, the bundles of non-human cells we host, the songs of Townes Van Zandt, every poem we’ve ever read. Not of us but in us, not ours but flowing through us. With this, they come alive — too late, perhaps, but who isn’t? Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel is a lyric daybook where the days never start and never end, in which the tiniest sparks of attention and perception address the deepest questions of language, meaning and consciousness — what it is to have a body and a soul, what it is to speak, or not to. Here, between the beforelife and the afterlife, it invites us to imagine new forms of living and dying, loving, care-taking, co-existing -- how we live with, amongst, inside of one another and the art we make.
Jennifer Hodgson

‘Oh Townes, thinking is tiring,’ writes Ellen Dillon. Thinking is tiring, it’s true! But Dillon’s way of thinking is invigorating and this collection ultimately rings out with so many truths, with so many gorgeous and infectious thoughts, with lines like, ‘Haunting is / a second life,’ and, ‘The quiet revolutions of loneliness are a politics.’ Through the use of stunning and carefully thought-out form, and via a complicated addressee — Dillon superbly delves into the deepest parts of the self. She understands supremely that ‘avoiding what happened doesn’t make it go away.’ Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel absolutely reverberates with rhythm, with song.
Loisa Fenichell

When the moon hits your eye, the figure in the bed could be from Beckett, but isn’t. Ellen Dillon’s Farewell Thee Well, Miss Carousel lives on an abstract plane, but also a material and vexing one. Untangling its proximities and lifetimes of thinking will take all that you have by way of exertion, but you will feel, frankly, better for it. Using music as a handrail, Dillon goes far further than those Deleuzian debate club boys could imagine on the business of the body and the soul, and with greater verve, lyric intensity and quiet fury than we deserve.
Andrew Spragg

Published by HVTN Press

Softcover
121 pages
150 x 210mm
ISBN 9781838311841