Any God Will Do by Virginia Konchan (review)

Virginia Konchan is the author of the poetry collection The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2018); a collection of short stories entitled Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017); and three chapbooks, Empire of Dirt (above/ground press, 2019), The New Alphabets (Anstruther, 2019) and Vox Populi (Finishing Line, 2015). She is also the coeditor (with Sarah Giragosian) of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (U of Akron P, 2022). Her most recent poetry collection, Any God Will Do (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2020), is perhaps most remarkable for its expansive use of the lyric, the ways in which it embraces various idioms, registers, and tones, and mediates between varied texts and voices. Any God Will Do showcases the deft discursive shifts of a poet interested in productively blurring so-called high and low culture, poetic difficulty, and accessibility.

These investigations into lyric subjectivity are more concerned with the disruptive values of poetry, like aporia, ellipsis, and rupture, than with transcendence, revelation, and epiphany. Often whimsical and idiosyncratic, her poems model the swift vagaries and divagations of the mind in action as they swing from one register to another. They shape meaning out of an eclectic range of subjects: from the spiritually and psychically enervating forces of capitalism to the loneliness of living in an American imperial state to the violence of living through the environmental crisis.

In the opening poem, "A Star is Born," the poet writes, "Don't mess with a woman / from Texas. No, I'm not / from Texas, but I was raised / by wolves. In saying that, though, / am I appropriating the experience / of those literally raised by wolves, / as I was only using it as a metaphor for neglect?" Here she exploits a rhetoric of self-consciousness, as she finds humor in the slippages (and limitations) of metaphor. The poem flirts with the corrosive effects of neoliberalism—with its emphasis on hyper-individualism and competition—on the self: "There is no way to describe / the sublimity of music / entering a room suffering / under a gag rule for years. / If I can learn to do that, / my God, I will have won." Unafraid to implicate her speakers, Konchan gravitates toward flawed, riveting subjectivities that oscillate between loneliness and moodiness, cheekiness and candor. In their full-tilt tonal movement, they are at once playful and political, as in "Epithalamium," a poem that seeks to "decolonize" both marriage and language, each with its own complex and entangled relations to power: "I ask you to help me move / the cadaver: you demure. / I ask you to help me conjugate / French verbs: you aver."

In "Empire," as in many poems throughout the collection, she inquires into the relationship between power and language. While the empire in question is never identified forthright, it is redolent of an American empire allied with media-speak and technocapitalism that has instrumentalized language and made it impotent. She writes, "We make inroads in discourse, / interventions and the like, / while in neighboring countries / body parts are auctioned / and punishment meted out / according to fallible law." She then turns to a lyric canon, including the works of T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, William Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson, even as she tests the aesthetic theories of these poets. For example, in the same poem, signposting William's famous dictum "No ideas but in things," Konchan writes, "So much depends upon / the right words in the right order, / not just spoken in mutiny, / but also propinquity. / This vodka, for example, / is made of bison grass / and can be applied to wounds. / Draw closer. I have distilled / the literal. You can touch it—/the idea within the thing, metaphor." In this revision of Williams's dictum, Konchan's speaker posits that metaphor is a functional and generative in the human consciousness, even while accounting for the slipperiness and subterfuge of metaphor, which can be both divisive (given its potentially essentializing logic) and beneficial, even healing, as in the vodka that can be applied to wounds. With impressive agility, Konchan revisits...