Overview

Poems that explore literary and religious depictions of grief to honor the loss of a mother. Requiem is a collection anchored in personal and collective grief, remembrance, and commemoration, journeying through the loss of a mother in a series of elegies, fugues, and lamentations that draw from the Church's canonical hours of prayer as collected in a breviary. Historical and religious mourning rites, and the grief work of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, and Mozart, among others, establish a lyric dialogue around aesthetic representations of grief, invoking a doubleness between the griever and the grieved; a mutuality and interconnectedness that illuminate the role of witness in poetry, mortality, and transcendence. Requiem enacts our deepest longing: to honor and immortalize the beloved.

Full Product Details

9780887487095

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Virginia Konchan is an expert on the vivid caverns of interior life, and a poet who listens in her poems as much as she speaks. We are in a hospital. We are in an 'architecture of surveillance.' We are in a dive bar, at the gravesite of a cat, witness to the Trojan battlefield. The poems are anchored in histories and realities while at the same time, parallel splintering occurs and out of it, a new world of gods, rain, regrets, and 'the cold, the dark, the future.' It is impossible to fully acknowledge what Konchan accomplishes in this book of meta-critical thinking: her revelations are wizard-like, authentic, and masterful. The best book I’ve read in a long time."" * Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I'm Told * ""There is a poem in this book about an imaginary friend whom the author, as a child, 'encouraged others to believe in.' And before long, reading these startling poems, I came to realize that the gifted voice of this book had become my own imaginary friend—as the greatest poems do: someone kind and preternaturally intelligent, yet also worldly and wounded; the voice of someone who has faced all the dangers I will never have the courage to face—and someone I hope that you, unknown reader, will be persuaded to 'believe in' with all your heart."" * Daniel Tiffany, author of Cry Baby Mystic * ""The concept of sympathetic magic sheds light on the belief that the more tightly we clasp our hands in prayer, the more likely our prayers will be heard. With their exquisitely white-knuckled thought and skeins of sinewed music, the poems in Virginia Konchan’s magnificent new crisis, the poems display such extraordinary prehensile strength and refusal to let go—of what the poet grieves, loves, hopes for, and deserves—it is impossible to look away from them, or to be left unchanged by them. 'I’m tired of arguing with God,' she confides, and of course she is, but she later swings back with 'I want to exaggerate my movements and my / words, like a keynote speaker on ketamine,' knowing that 'The world won’t fuck off until I’m no longer / in this world.' Dauntless, unquiet, and riddled with more wisdom than anyone should have to bear alone, Requiem is one of the most courageous books I’ve read in a long time, and also one of the best."" * Timothy Donnelly *

""There is a poem in this book about an imaginary friend whom the author, as a child, 'encouraged others to believe in.' And before long, reading these startling poems, I came to realize that the gifted voice of this book had become my own imaginary friend--as the greatest poems do: someone kind and preternaturally intelligent, yet also worldly and wounded; the voice of someone who has faced all the dangers I will never have the courage to face--and someone I hope that you, unknown reader, will be persuaded to 'believe in' with all your heart.""-- ""Daniel Tiffany, author of Cry Baby Mystic"" ""Virginia Konchan is an expert on the vivid caverns of interior life, and a poet who listens in her poems as much as she speaks. We are in a hospital. We are in an 'architecture of surveillance.' We are in a dive bar, at the gravesite of a cat, witness to the Trojan battlefield. The poems are anchored in histories and realities while at the same time, parallel splintering occurs and out of it, a new world of gods, rain, regrets, and 'the cold, the dark, the future.' It is impossible to fully acknowledge what Konchan accomplishes in this book of meta-critical thinking: her revelations are wizard-like, authentic, and masterful. The best book I've read in a long time.""-- ""Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I'm Told"" ""The concept of sympathetic magic sheds light on the belief that the more tightly we clasp our hands in prayer, the more likely our prayers will be heard. With their exquisitely white-knuckled thought and skeins of sinewed music, the poems in Virginia Konchan's magnificent new collection, Requiem, are reinforced by this same logic. Like crystalline petitions from a life in crisis, the poems display such extraordinary prehensile strength and refusal to let go--of what the poet grieves, loves, hopes for, and deserves--it is impossible to look away from them, or to be left unchanged by them. 'I'm tired of arguing with God, ' she confides, and of course she is, but she later swings back with 'I want to exaggerate my movements and my / words, like a keynote speaker on ketamine, ' knowing that 'The world won't fuck off until I'm no longer / in this world.' Dauntless, unquiet, and riddled with more wisdom than anyone should have to bear alone, Requiem is one of the most courageous books I've read in a long time, and also one of the best.""-- ""Timothy Donnelly""

Author Information

Virginia Konchan is the author of five books of poetry, including Bel Canto, Hallelujah Time, Any God Will Do, and The End of Spectacle, as well as a short story collection, Anatomical Gift. She is coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Atlantic, Believer, and Academy of American Poets.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available