Bel Canto by Virginia Konchan

Description

Carnegie Mellon University Press, paperback

Publication Date: December 20th, 2022

Publisher Marketing: Poems that restore primacy to lyric subjectivity, sensibility, paradox, and alterity. Bel Canto is a collection belonging to the post-confessional tradition, whose protean speaker, a fast-talking theorist brimming with hypotheses and maxims, seeks to dismantle various power hierarchies by a dramatic staging of interiority and sensuous rebirth of meaning and desire, in moving, complex, funny, and cutting poems that cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. Suggesting that revolutionary change will be linguistic, or will not be at all, Bel Canto critiques the alienating forces of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy by restoring primacy to lyric subjectivity, sensibility, paradox, and alterity through a kaleidoscopic array of registers, modes, and idioms ironic and sincere. “What human could stay so quiet?” asks the speaker of “Epistle” “One who is secretly on fire.”

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