BABEL VIA NEGATIVA

WINNER OF IBPA BENJAMIN FRANKLIN GOLD AWARD (POETRY)

WINNER OF LIVING NOW BRONZE BOOK AWARD (METAPHYSICAL)

Authored by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Babel Via Negativa is bizarre in its cross-genre renderings. The new poetic form of the asingbol is given its own chapter, followed by a play, and several essays. In her praise of the book, Lily Hoang says: “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.”

In his glowing review, Richard Collins shares: “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.”

Jointly Published by Ethos Books and Squircle Line Press

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