Fiction. "A skeptical, pottymouthed Cinderella. A Hungarian nude model who debates consciousness. A clerk in a gun shop run by a jerk named Jesus. A respite caregiver looking for change. The characters in Virginia Konchan's ANATOMICAL GIFT pop off the page and onto the barstool next to us to give us the rough wisdom we need."—Daniel Nester

Anatomical Gift

Literature & Fiction

Konchan, Virginia

Short Stories & Anthologies

Noctuary Press

“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.”

The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon Poetry)

Poetry

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

"There are no machine guns, or cameras, here." 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.

Any God Will Do (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Poems that restore primacy to lyric subjectivity, sensibility, paradox, and alterity. Bel Canto is a collection belonging to the post-confessional tradition, whose protean speaker, a fast-talking theorist brimming with hypotheses and maxims, seeks to dismantle various power hierarchies by a dramatic staging of interiority and sensuous rebirth of meaning and desire, in moving, complex, funny, and cutting poems that cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. Suggesting that revolutionary change will be linguistic, or will not be at all, Bel Canto critiques the alienating forces of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy by restoring primacy to lyric subjectivity, sensibility, paradox, and alterity through a kaleidoscopic array of registers, modes, and idioms ironic and sincere. "What human could stay so quiet?" asks the speaker of "Epistle": "One who is secretly on fire."

Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Self-Help

Relationships