Any God Will Do, Poetry
Any God Will Do is a collection that investigates the lines between worldliness and asceticism, belief and delusion, chance and design, desire and its transcendence. Internal and end rhyme structure these pithy and compact poems that are rife with classical, pop culture, and poetic allusions. They culminate in an argument that intimacy and creation through language are not only possible within a capitalist framework, but indeed may be the only ballasts we know.
“Urgent, whip-smart—each poem opens like shaken champagne.”
— John Emil Vincent
“Another astonishing achievement, perhaps most remarkable for its expansion of the lyric, the ways in which it resists interpretative mastery and embraces discursions among various idioms, registers, and tones and mediations . . . With crackling irony and a paratactic lyricism that keeps the reader on her toes, Any God Will Do examines the alienating impacts of Western neoliberalism, capitalism, environmental catastrophe, and media-speak. These are poems of our time—urgent, explosive, and yet still buoying in their democratic sweep and probing investigations into lyric theory, metaphor, and language. How does one critique empire while in its slow death grip? Konchan’s collection proposes that it is not in the lyric transcendence of pain to song, but in a turn to the equivocal and intersubjective spaces of a highly intertextual poetics.”
— Sarah Giragosian
“Konchan’s gloriously scathing and exhilarating second book mines the flotsam and jetsam of failed romance (“O eros, put away your bully stick”) and the god-awful “claptrap” of ersatz culture. Lioness-fierce (“I am not a marble goddess whose breasts resemble / bayonets of Spring), acerbic and magical (“the moon is in her stirrups / and the doctor’s prognosis is time”), Any God Will Do arrives on the scene, all systems go, as a lover’s lament, a fist-fast roller coaster, and a rocket-blast: hold onto your seat!”
— Cyrus Cassells
“Konchan, a self-confessed ‘atheist who says her prayers,’ is also a fast-talking phrase-maker of the first order who can switch poetic registers from the aporetic to the operatic in the pause after a period. Her ‘fallback plan / is style,’ and although she claims, ‘I have reached the end / of my ability to troubleshoot,’ these stylish poems shoot for trouble and nail it. Any God Will Do is a dictionary of desire, a breviary of post-religious bravery, and a book chockablock with lines that prove Konchan right when she writes, ‘I interrupt my programming / to say something original.’”
–— Stephen Kampa
Review by Jefferson Navicky in The Cafe Review
Review by Sarah Giragosian in Prairie Schooner
Review by Dominique Béchard in The Fiddlehead
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