Join us to celebrate the launch of Virginia Konchan’s newest collection of poems, Requiem, with guest readers Zach Savich and Alison Stine. This event will be live-streamed on Zoom - if you’re not able to join us in the store, use the meeting info below or click the button to join virtually.
Meeting ID: 897 3128 6480
Passcode: 429828
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. 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.
Virginia Konchan is the author of five books of poetry, including Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025) and Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon, 2022), as well as a short story collection, Anatomical Gift. Coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), and recipient of fellowships from the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The Believer.
Zach Savich's latest books are the poetry collection Momently and the hybrid critical-memoir-for-performance A Field of Telephones. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Alison Stine's first novel Road Out of Winter won the Philip K. Dick Award. Her second novel Trashlands was long-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Also the author of three books of poetry and a novella, her awards include an Individual Artist Fellowship from the NEA and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Her new novel is Dust, from Wednesday Books/St. Martin's Press.
“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.”