Any God Will Do

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

“Konchan’s gloriously scathing and exhilarating second book mines the flotsam and jetsam of failed romance (“O eros, put away your bully stick”) and the god-awful “claptrap” of ersatz culture. Lioness-fierce (“I am not a marble goddess whose breasts resemble / bayonets of Spring), acerbic and magical (“the moon is in her stirrups / and the doctor’s prognosis is time”), Any God Will Do arrives on the scene, all systems go, as a lover’s lament, a fist-fast roller coaster, and a rocket-blast: hold onto your seat!”

“Konchan, a self-confessed ‘atheist who says her prayers,’ is also a fast-talking phrase-maker of the first order who can switch poetic registers from the aporetic to the operatic in the pause after a period. Her ‘fallback plan / is style,’ and although she claims, ‘I have reached the end / of my ability to troubleshoot,’ these stylish poems shoot for trouble and nail it. Any God Will Do is a dictionary of desire, a breviary of post-religious bravery, and a book chockablock with lines that prove Konchan right when she writes, ‘I interrupt my programming / to say something original.’”