""Let our scars fall in love,"" Galway Kinnell said. In this compelling book, Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingde 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 Dali'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 Josemaria Escriva. 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.
"Desmond Kon's Heart Fiat displays his signature grace and erudition at its best. 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, author of Phyla of Joy
"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."
--Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate, Emerita
"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, Author of The Mansions
"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
"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, Professor Emeritus, author of Tigom: Collected Poems
"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 e...
Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé (b. 1971) has authored 19 books, spanning poetry, fiction, memoir, and experimental writing. A former journalist, he has edited over 25 titles. He is the recipient of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, Singapore Literature Prize, two Illumination Christian Book Awards, two Independent Publisher Book Awards, and five Living Now Book Awards. A Harvard and Notre Dame alumnus of theology and creative writing, Desmond has taught writing for over two decades.
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