Poetry Festival Singapore—August 1, 2024
To contribute to the flourishing of the literary arts and to mark the first papal visit to Singapore in 38 years in September 2024, Poetry Festival Singapore is launching Heart Fiat, a new poetry collection by award-winning Singapore author Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé.
“The poems within this new collection have journeyed with me over several years,” Kon says. “The manuscript was rather complete, being readied for the publisher. When the Holy See Press Office announced that Pope Francis would travel to Asia and Oceania, with a stop in Singapore, I was delighted and excited. The timing simply couldn’t be more perfect. I had renewed passion, all amped up to make this book not just respectable, but a worthy tribute. It is with deep humility and gratitude that I dedicate this first edition to Pope Francis, whom I have such admiration and love for.”
In early September, Pope Francis will make an Apostolic Journey to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and Singapore. In 1986, Pope Saint John Paul II made a trip to Singapore. This year, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Singapore remains grateful in welcoming Pope Francis to its shores, between 11–13 September. Indeed, the country’s Catholic faithful are greatly looking forward to the Eucharistic celebration with the Pope on 12 September.
As a Roman Catholic, Kon regards Heart Fiat as the most personally significant work within his oeuvre. He shares that it counts as one title among his most fulfilling projects to date, which include two anthologies, both co-edited with Eric Tinsay Valles, a long-time collaborator—and in veritate et caritate, Kon’s godfather.
A Given Grace: An Anthology of Christian Poems commemorates the Philippine Quincentennial and Singapore Bicentennial of Catholicism, and was selected for exhibition at the Catholic200SG Festival in 2021. The following year saw the launch of The Jesuit: Finding God in All Things, an exclusive anthology specially created to mark the Quadricentennial Canonization of St. Francis Xavier and St. Ignatius of Loyola.
The co-editors set a world record when both anthologies collected multiple literary accolades. This feat of accomplishment represented a world’s first-ever—twice over—for any writer to receive both the Illumination Christian Book Gold Award (Digital Media) and the Living Now Gold Book Award (Digital Media) for two separate publications in consecutive years.
As the author goes on to share, Heart Fiat remains his love gift to the Catholic Church. “The poems now take on a brighter hue,” Kon says, “overlaid and infused with more blessed meaning. This collection is an expression of my steadfast, intense and profound love for Christ.”
Individual poems have previously appeared in over twenty literary venues, including such esteemed international journals as Rabbit from Australia, Poems for Ephesians from Canada, Voice & Verse from Hong Kong, QLRS from Singapore, and Notre Dame Review from the USA.
This first edition is published by Poetry Festival Singapore. In various markets, the book will be available for purchase under Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Kinokuniya ships Heart Fiat worldwide. For book details and online purchase, please visit Kinokuniya’s website here.
Book Synopsis:
“Let our scars fall in love,” Galway Kinnell said. In this compelling book, Kon moves his love language over old wounds, deep cuts now seemingly inappreciable. Scarred over and smoothed out—by grace. Yet, how reasoned and magnificent the rising for air, the lyric ascent that wraps a heady mix of theological imagination and handsome aesthetics, without pause or apology. This is a hearty nod to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s three transcendentals of Being—beauty, goodness, truth. In these poems, one experiences the full-bodied witness of Catholic piety, one that remains brave, vulnerable, curious, devoted, and above all, reverent.
The lines traverse a broad, lustrous terrain, from Mount Olivet to Macau, Malacca to Montreal. From Caravaggio’s Deposition of Christ to Salvador Dalí’s Ascension of Christ. From the Church of Agios Lazaros to the Church of the Sepulchre of Saint Mary. One walks through Ordinary Time to Advent, and looks on the year Ash Wednesday fell on Saint Valentine’s Day. Without reservation, there remains an adoring love for the Holy Eucharist. And veneration for what is an impressive host of saints—from Saint Monica to Saint Rose of Lima, Saint John of the Cross to Saint Josemaría Escrivá.
How do our conversations with God inhabit their own speech acts, then settle comfortably into the contemplative, the deep quiet of silence? How does the language of the confessional translate itself into confessional poetry, the expressed lyric turning itself over and over again, how iterative, how manifold the unfolding and infolding. A language always stationed in a state of contingency, open in its gentle evolutions—by turns; yet, all at once. The fragile transformations as delicate and faint, as they remain illumined, uplit. Always looking heavenward, toward the light, toward transcendence.
Book Praise:
Lifting us far beyond this earthbound life, Desmond Kon’s Heart Fiat displays his signature grace and erudition at its best, revealing a soul shot through with the light of eternity where God resides. This collection is Kon’s literary treasure trove of love offerings—poems of “bright light” guiding us through “the way of language,” a realm of a faith-infused imagination where the sacraments of daily life yield wonder and awe in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The truth shimmers on these pages with an “eternal echo” in praise of Christ, the giver of all good gifts, and ultimately, our salvation.
—Karen An-hwei Lee
Recipient of Kathryn A. Morton Prize and Norma Farber First Book Award
Author of The Beautiful Immunity and Phyla of Joy
“Holy…is this moment of needing definitions,” thus Desmond Kon situates his exploration of meaning in a rich Catholic topography inhabited by blessed ones and saints, pilgrims and penitent sinners. In a fascinating, all-encompassing tour where “the transcendental signified is situated, proper” there is no area beyond experience that is not imbued with the sacred, the miraculous. What a blessing it is to encounter a poet so immersed in God’s Word that he may prayerfully, convincingly aver, “all things now made for this, to house our love.”
—Sofia M. Starnes
Virginia Poet Laureate, Emerita
Author of The Consequence of Moonlight and other works
Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s collection, Heart Fiat, is unlike any book I have read. This striking work of confessional poetry of varied forms and subjects reflects the author’s great love of language from the simple to the erudite. His rock-solid Catholic faith and devotion, very much informed by the Ignatian spirituality of his namesake, is clearly evident here. The combination of his intellectual theology with his humble and unaffected piety is so felicitous and so very refreshing in our often jaded world today. Please God, the deep ruminations and reflections in Desmond’s striking collection of poetry will inspire the readers of this powerful work to ponder their own faith as seriously and as fruitfully as the author has his.
—Fr Gerard Garrigan, OSB
Author of The Sacred, The Profane, The Hodiamont
In Heart Fiat Desmond Kon roams the interior and exterior world as one. The spiritual and religious are here, but these realms are passages to the mysteries of our tangible existence: the “real presence” becomes the conviction, “now I begin”; the wedding at Cana prompts Kon to ask, who is “worth my lifetime of longing.” Elsewhere an account of the challenging marriage of a folk artist evokes a meditation on Saint Gertrude, who “is safe in the monastery of her own formation.” If you’ve thought the spiritual can be safely locked away, these poems will make you think again.
—Fr Tom Holahan, CSP
Creative Consultant of Paulist Productions
In the opening poem of Heart Fiat, Desmond Kon explains, “I was taught the virtue of exacting strain / from the particular, / an exactitude of language… Till meaning broke.” What follows are rituals of defining and trying to define, of variation within repetition, as well as ancient and contemporary narratives knotted together as epistle, list, contrition, and lament. In lyrical, experimental, and prose poems, Kon keeps unfolding meaning into a call-and-response with philosophers, theologians, poets, and saints. In these fast-moving poems—where brackets underscore thought within thought—Kon presents “no illusion / but a mirror / of what faith can become.”
—Marjorie Maddox
Recipient of Academy of American Poets Prize and Cornell University Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Prize
Author of Begin with a Question and other works
The poems in Heart Fiat by Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé defy easy categorization, but they can surely be called extravagant, in the true meaning of the word, “wandering outside boundaries.” From their disparate forms, their wide-ranging intellectual, artistic and literary references, and the precise and surprising language, these poems demand to be reread, all the better out loud. But what truly captivated me was Kon’s voice, the intimacy he offers, and the unfolding self-revelations, which are not for his sake alone, but for anyone on a companionate journey.
—Maryanne Hannan
Author of Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials
As epigraph to Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop offers a list of questions that frame the poems to follow. Similarly, Desmond Kon frames the greater body of Heart Fiat with questions given in the “daily examen,” a technique of prayerful reflection meant to poise the contemplative soul toward God. Rather than a geographical journey, what follows in Kon’s book is something closer to a theater of the soul, one richly and responsively populated with the words and images of saints and poets, artists and theologians, scriptures and iphones, and all refracted through this exuberant poet’s vibrant communion of art and prayer, his “holy song.” At once sweeping and probing, venturesome and precise, the poems of Heart Fiat know that while there will be times “nothing seems adequate as a salve or balm,” there is always before us “the great yes,” as well as the joyful and bracing knowledge that “love demands an idiom.”
—Daniel Tobin
Recipient of Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry and The Discovery/The Nation Award
Author of The Mansions and other works
At the same time learned and passionate, Desmond Kon is the consummate Catholic poet whose “litany of sounds” will mesmerize any reader sensitive to the spiritual life or, indeed, just poetry itself. In his collection Heart Fiat, the poet has the self-confidence and the talent to surrender himself to the poem “as each line must carve itself into form”—indeed, as if the poem by its own intuition, even wisdom, had the power to find its way into sacredness. And as a result, we, the readers, experience something extraordinary as we feel the charged and indelible pressure of each word “like ink on skin, this heavy black.” In this process of intense spiritual and physical revelation, poem and prayer become gloriously indistinguishable.
—Orlando Ricardo Menes
Recipient of Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Author of Memoria and The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds
Flame ignites the page,
A life indelibly changed:
A hope and prayer.
—Eric Tinsay Valles
Recipient of Illumination Christian Book Award and Goh Sin Tub Creative Writing Prize
Author of After the Fall: Dirges Among Ruins
This is the city of the mind after the Fall. After tyrannous empires die and come to life over and over to torment us. After the Bomb, its constant curse threatening our fragile peace. In these days of diaspora when the sons and daughters of men and women scrabble for survival on the edges of inhospitable borderlands. In these times when language is a mere bundle of flippant clichés without meaning. How does one create poetry in this bleak landscape? With the heart’s fiat, with faith, finding God’s tracks among the rubble of words, shards of history, splinters of memory. He is there, still there, heart fiat says.
—Merlie M. Alunan
Recipient of Sunthorn Phu Award for Poetry and Philippine National Book Award
Professor Emeritus, Author of Tigom: Collected Poems and other works
For many years I’ve avoided poetry, probably because I was compelled to recite it throughout high school by many white-haired professors. But now, as my own white hairs begin to show, my thirst for poetic verse has grown, mainly through reading or listening to the likes of Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé and some of his contemporaries. For me, Kon’s Heart Fiat struck some of the right chords, lifting my soul a little higher, even though the journey was somewhat shrouded in mystery. I had a full-blown chiaroscuro experience as I made way through the scenes. There were moments of immense darkness, where I was grappling to understand, or to feel a particular emotion, while other times, the light pierced through, reflecting from my mind, into my heart, turning it, a little more, from stone to flesh. This led to momentary bursts of joy or some minutes of hot therapeutic tears, and for this I’m forever grateful to Desmond. This commendation was completed on the Feast of Our Lady of Mt Carmel.
—Sebastian James
Journalist, Associated Press
Many poems in Heart Fiat are stunning, and together they create an illumination, utterly inspired by God. This collection’s beauty lies in its inherent purposes—to celebrate living and wonder about the relationship between poetry and the divine: “Petitions. Or, to ask: When does prayer / become a poem, and a poem a prayer?” As these poems inquire and consider answers, readers encounter other voices—everyone from the Saints to Monet to the Serbian American poet Charles Simic. Heart Fiat employs multiple forms, some hybrid, and all with a contemporary bent. The combination leaves the reader awed at Kon’s facility to use form and language for the highest expression, forming a riot of Love.
—Kimberly K. Williams
Recipient of WILLA Literary Prize in Poetry and Canberra Critics Award
Author of Still Lives and other works
Author Biography:
DESMOND Francis Xavier KON Zhicheng-Mingdé (b. 1971) is the author of an epistolary novel, a quasi-memoir, two lyric essay monographs, four hybrid works, ten poetry collections, and a guided creative journal. The former journalist has edited over twenty-five titles. Trained in publishing at Stanford University, Desmond studied sociology and mass communication at the National University of Singapore, and later received his theology masters from Harvard University and creative writing masters from the University of Notre Dame. Recipient of grants from the National Arts Council and Singapore International Foundation, he has enjoyed literary appointments at the Notre Dame Poetry Fellowship, NAC Gardens by the Bay Writing Residency, and NTU-NAC Creative Writing Residency. Among other accolades, Desmond is the recipient of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, National Indie Excellence Book Award, Poetry World Cup, Singapore Literature Prize, two Independent Publisher Book Awards, two Illumination Christian Book Awards, two eLit Book Awards, and five Living Now Book Awards. He is Senior Lecturer (Creative Writing & Publishing) at Nanyang Technological University. He can be found at: desmondkon.com
