Hallelujah Time

Hallelujah Time, Virgina Konchan’s third full-length poetry collection—and the first to appear in Canada—delivers up poetry that is unlike anything being written today. Specializing in fast-moving monologues that track the vagaries and divagations of a mind in action, Konchan cuts our most hallowed cultural institutions and constructions down to size. She bracingly confronts the contemporary need to constantly adjust our masks to appease impossible standards, and our desperate fear of having our true selves be seen and understood. Hallelujah Time embraces a dazzling mix of idioms, registers, and tones in poems that compress everything they know into aphoristic, hard-boiled insights as arresting as they are witty, theatrical as they are sincere. “My human desire,” Konchan writes, “is simple: / to live on the perpetual cusp / of extremity.”

Reviews

“Urgent, whip-smart—each poem opens like shaken champagne.” —John Emil Vincent

“Konchan’s audacious, sophisticated, and valiant poems, fueled by their honest failure to outwit mourning, are a revelation.” —Catherine Wagner

“Her work is flamboyant, but underlying the glitz is a serious engagement with how we create meaning out of a welter of experiences and influences.” —Barb Carey, Toronto Star

“Anchored in a tone that balances personal perspective and intellectual relativity, Konchan’s poems are able to twist from frivolity to striking wisdom, turn from comedic imagery to aphorisms on life and death, without sacrificing their emotional core.” – Montreal Review of Books