Babel Via Negativa
• Babel Via Negativa was the winner for the 2nd Annual USA Regional Excellence Book Awards, 2016 (Spirituality category) for Northeast region
• Winner of Benjamin Franklin Book Awards
Babel Via Negativa is a collection of hybrid scripting, described by Lily Hoang as a “menagerie” with “tweets suspended in hypotaxis, an intertextual roundtable about the chicken that couldn’t cross the road, and essays that smash poetics with Kon’s distinctive transnational sass”. Dive into the invented form of the asingbol, assorted poetic ruminations, lost acts of translation, or the five critical essays that speak of the ultimate limits of language – what it means to say and unsay. The book has also been described by Richard Collins as “a feast of juxtapositions” and “an impossibility of conversations”.
Babel Via Negativa
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Paperback
$21.50 SGD
Reviews
“Kon’s short pieces are tersely poetic, honed, and demanding. Active readers will take the bait and delight in the rich stories that he has distilled.” - Ben White, Editor of Nanoism
“Desmond Kon’s Babel Via Negativa is a menagerie: Peek inside and find tweets suspended in hypotaxis, an intertextual roundtable about the chicken that couldn’t cross the road, and essays that smash poetics with Kon’s distinctive transnational sass. This is a book of collapsing boundaries. This is a book of defiant aphorisms and salacious reverie.” - Lily Hoang, Recipient of PEN Beyond Margins Award
“As children, when we first see books, every word is a wonderment. Kon’s work gives us back that awe, full‐grown. I have often rejoiced in these lines of Kon’s, published in unFold: ‘He walked into the thunderclouds on the horizon. / The machete cut a way through the sugarcane to boats on the wharf. / Flight.’ In ‘Tweet Goes the Poplar Tree,’ that intriguingly complete/incomplete story kicks off its sandals and slips into a journey of wonderment, from a ‘tiger bittern, limber barline,’ past a ‘turn, hopscotch into the unknown meadows,’ all the way to ‘deep winters’ of inadvertent emanation. Some poets show us where we’ve been. Kon leads us up to ‘the open roof’ and reveals a new avenue there.” - Rose Auslander Author of Folding Water
“No one writes quite like Desmond Kon Zhicheng‐Mingdé. It is not just that he has found new forms (though he has), not just that his syntax is a rarity (it is), not just that he has something to say that has, somehow, not been said before (it hasn’t). In other hands, the new, the rare, the as‐yet‐unsaid is not always pleasurable, not always beautiful, not always delicious. This book though is a feast of juxtapositions, a mélange of miscegenations, an impossibility of conversations, from the complex simplicity of the poems (like a blue belt) to the roughening texture of the essays (like a cat’s tongue). I consider it one of the triumphs of my efforts as an editor to have published several of these beautiful enigmas in Xavier Review.” - Richard Collins, Dean of Arts and Humanities, CSU Bakersfield
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Attunement
Is life hustling you out of tune? As the week roars by, we invite you to a slice of attunement penned lovingly by our authors, friends, and yours truly. Freshly delivered weekly with care. Intimacy guaranteed. Read selected letters below.
Magical, luminous things
Feb 19, 2022
I have flown across an ocean this week. This still sounds surreal to say.
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No negotiation for blood debt
Feb 14, 2022
The Burmese language resistance poetry is deeply embedded in the country’s colonial past. When mo...
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Burning holes in the darkness
Feb 7, 2022
Poets killed in broad daylight, writers tortured and maimed. I wonder if their ghosts watch on fr...
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