LYRIC ESSAYS
BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR
​
Hermitage
of Dreamers
“The journey is no less than a quest for
enlightenment, for oneness with a
sacred realm. The effect is touching,
provocative, and beautiful.”
​
Thaddeus Rutkowski
​
​
“Masterfully demonstrates how the space
between art and divinity collapses
in our search for solace.”
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
SELECTED TITLES
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
Desmond Kon’s catholic
taste, generous spirit, and
love of great writing
is everywhere evident
in this wild, risky,
heartfelt book.
MICHAEL RYAN
RECIPIENT OF THE KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARD
...a rapacious literary transformer. His own literary output has been prodigious, varied, playful, unapologetically intellectual, and out-there.
YEOW KAI CHAI
DIRECTOR OF THE
SINGAPORE WRITERS FESTIVAL
It is a curling of poetic weight: each line pushes lactic acid through our muscles into euphoria—the euphoria of the lyric—and Kon is a champion power lifter.
LILY HOANG
RECIPIENT OF THE
PEN BEYOND MARGINS AWARD
ABOUT
2022
I write poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and weird hybrid thingamajigs in between.
​
I am Catholic. Interestingly, my work has been read as anything from modernist to postmodernist to metamodernist, with the heart and stylistic temperament of, say, Romantic or Baroque poetry.
I do have a penchant for lyric compression, irony, extended metaphor, kitsch, absurdity, and surrealism.
I absolutely love playing with language, especially language that interrogates how meaning is made.
I like to write about the impossibility
of language, to explore what remains unsayable, inexpressible, ineffable.
​
I am excited by new ideas and happenings in history, theology, art, literature, philosophy, anthropology,
film, publishing, among other subjects.
​
I teach too, edit lots, do readings, and organise literary events. When I can
find the time, I return to a bit of drawing
and sculpting. For the most part, I try
to preserve an unhurried, quiet,
hermitic life.