cover image The End of Spectacle

The End of Spectacle

Virginia Konchan. Carnegie Mellon Univ, $15.95 trade paper (72p) ISBN 978-0-88748-631-9

Konchan questions notions of selfhood and the ways it can be constructed in her graceful debut, calling upon such varied characters, symbols, and historical figures as Dolores Haze, the Virgin Mary, and the Tree of Life. Here, initial appearances are often deceptive. The essence or purpose of an object undergoes constant metamorphosis or is otherwise obscured: a sumptuous “bath/ of sublime temperature” is drawn for “purely decorative” purposes; teenagers dive into a pool, “thrashing their way into form”; and the body is framed as “a segment of prehistoric road/ A buried stairwell with only the top stair obvious.” Language and its uses come under similar scrutiny, seen as neither innocent nor neutral. In hell, for example, one is “led to a table of rhetoric./ Its edges are beveled and smooth.” Konchan’s collection is in many ways about the implicit responsibility of the observer and what observing contributes to the purpose of art. “Search not, art critic, for the moral lesson/ —famine, fire, flood—in this frame,” Konchan writes in a poem after Gauguin’s painting “Nativity.” Throughout this spare and subtle collection, Konchan confronts the discrepancies between substance and appearance: “the broken object/ in this painting is not my body, it is me.” (Feb.)