Author. Poet. Writer.
Christopher Konrad is an author, poet and writer interested in exploring quotidian experiences of being human.
What people are saying about Christopher Konrad’s publications
“The mad either misconstrue reality or see it too clearly: to the fragile one is as fatal as the other; for the rest, well they’re just considered ‘normal’. In Melbourne-based poet, Christopher Konrad’s Letters to Mark, anthropologist Adrian South wanders into the Tanami Desert in search of ‘Zarathustra’s Cave’. His journey – physical and metaphorical – is unreliably ‘narrated’ only through the opaque agency of epistles, prose, diary entries, poems, quotations and suchlike. The result is a philosophic, poetic and religious tone poem that has more in common with Richard Strauss’ Thus spake Zarathustra than with the anodyne Pachelbel and Mascagni mentioned therein.”
— Letters To Mark (Regime Books) Review by William Yoeman from the West Australian Newspaper
“Fortunately, while packed with layers of meaning, sonorous wordplay, cultural allusions and moving imagery, Chris’ Argot is very much accessible. To be sure, as will be noted, there is much use of paradox, the endings of poems frequently presenting alternative and sometimes opposite possibilities. Chris draws upon a huge range of multicultural references, reflecting his close and sharp awareness of such recent and monstrous catastrophes as the Second World War and the arrogance of racism, his enquiries into the nature of the self (he is an admirer or Pessoa and his extraordinary heteronyms) and what it means to be human, a fascination with the early origins of Christianity, the impact of central European thinkers and writers such as Kafka and Karl Kraus, the moral conundrums of Artificial Intelligence. And much more. In short, the voices and worlds of Chris’ poetry will vastly reward those who cross the frontiers of his work.”
— Argot (Pomonal Publishing) launch speech by Shane McCauley in Rochford Street Review
“Dense with naming birds and nature, Christopher Konrad’s latest poetry collection, Argot, is as much an education as it is poetry. In Feeding Grounds, (54) we learn of ‘sea birds · storm petrels, skuas, shearwaters.’ We immerse ourselves in imagery, sharp, consolidated. The words seem cut from the sea, ‘cut of viscosity /· akimbo and kilter of albatross / birthed from the Southern Ocean’ (54). This poem—wild like the ocean of which it speaks—takes us there, power driven and windswept: ‘The sea · an egress into tealshimmer / a wintry swell’ on which we feed; the title apt, immersed in colour, swell, winter. The language both encapsulates and catapults, cuts to the core, the cold, the poignant end lines, ‘the brine from which we derive / and to which we will return’ (54)”
— Review of Argot by Rose Van Son in Westerly Magazine
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My approach to creating
In my writing I look for the human experience. The liminal, irreal space as well as the everyday here and now: the quotidian.
I believe that in this world, along with suffering and pain, there is beauty, strength and redemption. My work looks to convey inspiration and hope.
I look to shake myself primarily out of the constraints of wishful or magical thinking whilst celebrating and sitting with that ordinary everyday life: not condemning myself to the mills of complacency or to some other form of self-defeat or servitude.
I completed a doctoral thesis in 2012 a part of which was my poetry book Letters to Mark. If you wish to read this thesis ‘Who is it that writes:poetry and the plural self.’ click here.
