Bel Canto

Questions open many of the poems in Virginia Konchan’s fourth collection, Bel Canto: “This world contains many worlds. / Why should the law of scarcity reign?”; “Show me your leader; I’ll show you mine. / Where have I been, busy rehearsing death?”; “You try being the looked at, lacking gender. / What is femininity: a variation on a theme?” Questions occur across the poems, too, by turns contemplating, refuting, probing, and demanding. This indefatigable questioning demonstrates an unwillingness to accept easy answers. 

Though they are not dialogues, the poems are dialogic in their fizzing tension between what the speaker knows and what they seek to understand. Mostly, these are overarching, eternal topics: love, fate, sex, God, power, history, everyday life:

The universe is an echo chamber of discordant matter.
Heaven is a fraudulent quorum of marooned demigods.
I am detached from personal narrative, history, identity:
whip out a dictionary and tell me what that means.
On the day the stars conspire against me,
I will conquer and overcome my ugliness.
Today, I saw the sun rise into a bank of clouds.
I want to be strong, and I want not to be strong.
I left the windows open. Is it raining now?

Latin and French poem titles—“Terra Nova,” “Les Années de Guerre,” “Memento Mori”—conjure a settled terrain, upended in poems rife with vulvas, combat vehicles, emails, gangster dice. Reliably, Konchan forges maxims that surprise. As declared in “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “Reality will invariably fuck you.” Even as the content and style of the poems remain similar, these spliced registers add a welcome zip.

But Konchan not only questions, she also commands: “Be thou my anchor, harbor, refuge, rock: / monetize me, on the way to higher ground.”; “Count, mourn, measure, and sift, until all that’s / left is legacy, and elegy’s endlessness is through.” Read as apostrophes, such lines proffer universal wisdom. How the world works, how people interact—such elemental ciphers are deftly unpicked, only to retangle.