The End of Spectacle, Poetry
“All hail the end of spectacle,” announces a speaker in Virginia Konchan’s anticipated debut collection of poems. Sharp, funny, serious, and elegant, the poems in The End of Spectacle have the intimacy and compression that come with the lyric proper. Through a combination of grand persona and personal narrative, Konchan is able to provide us a door into the consciousness of another while challenging the prevailing notion of human consciousness altogether. In this poet’s hands, individualities become opportunities, as Konchan pushes us to question our notions of selfhood and its relationship to our construction of the world. A timely collection from a poet who dismantles power structures in order to lament the damage in echoing song: “The idea / of freedom! Someone leapt: / someone else was dragged.”
“Konchan questions notions of selfhood and the ways it can be constructed in her graceful debut . . . [her] collection is in many ways about the implicit responsibility of the observer and what observing contributes to the purpose of art . . . Throughout this spare and subtle collection, Konchan confronts the discrepancies between substance and appearance.”
— Publishers Weekly
“‘How does one represent thinking?’ Virginia Konchan’s sumptuous collection The End of the Spectacle asks. The poems themselves provide the elegant answers. Lyrically lovely and intellectually grand, each studious piece suggests glamor as resistance to terror and banality. Stoic in its attitude, cutting in its polyglot erudition, this is a book with an ear for aperçus, which it uses to offer spectacle’s possible opposite: learnèd grace, polished and self-contained. What to do ‘at the end of the sensible world’? Read this book. It won’t save you, but it will house you for an hour or two. Amor fati never sounded so beautiful.”
— Kathleen Rooney
"Virginia Konchan’s poems move through the endless pre-boarding process of encounter, carving verbs into it, trying out different perspectives, acknowledging, with melancholy humor, how hard loving the world and one another can be. The ideals of being here now, of speaking freely, recede on gleaming tracks to the back of a stage where reality dances, inaccessible. Konchan’s audacious, sophisticated, and valiant poems, fueled by their honest failure to outwit mourning, are a revelation."
— Catherine Wagner
“Concerned with the intersection between love and death and the body, Konchan’s refined, musical poems regularly arrive at genuine revelation.”
— Allison Benis White
Review, Publishers Weekly
Review by Kristina Marie Darling in Ploughshares
Review by Kathy Goodkin in Cream City Review
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