Bel Canto, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022

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“Virginia Konchan’s Bel Canto is a metaphysical picaresque, a mutinous epic, an elegant subversion of old school aesthetics, consumerism, marketing, banal notions of selfhood and soul, ‘the whole damn work of representation,’ all in a champagne glass-shattering vocal performance like nothing else I’ve read. The allusions spark and spiral with iconoclastic power: ‘ . . . hope is the thing with feathers / that perches atop the combat vehicle.’ ‘Alexa, play Blessed Be Your Name.’ There is no collection more brilliantly suited to the times we’re living through. Bel Canto will rattle you like God rattles, like poetry rattles God.”

— Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

“At times, one has to sit back, catch a breath, and prepare for the next moment of awe, the next shekinah brightness of revelation.”
—John Davis Jr.

“Bel Canto is is at once a hard night and a lullaby, a lovingly ironic joyride . . . poetic and willful mastery abounds throughout this powerful collection.”
—Geoff Bouvier

“Virginia Konchan is a poet willing to resurrect the sacred.”
—Dylan Welch

“[Her] lines offer universal wisdom.”
—Sylee Gore

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