The End of Spectacle
2018
First Published
4.30
Average Rating
72
Number of Pages
"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."
Avg Rating
4.30
Number of Ratings
23
5 STARS
57%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
4%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads
Author
Virginia Konchan
Author · 3 books
Virginia Konchan is the author of four poetry collections: Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon, 2022), Hallelujah Time (Véhicule Press, 2021), Any God Will Do, and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2020 and 2018), and a short story collection, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017). Coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Yale Review, Boston Review, and The Believer.
