The End of Spectacle

“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.”