VI
VI KHI NAO is a queer Vietnamese -American writer & interdisciplinary artist whose work spans visual art, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration.
She is the author of seven poetry collections, including A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019), Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and The Old Philosopher, winner of the 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her fiction works include the short story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won the 2016 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and the novel Fish in Exile(Coffee House Press, 2016).
Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review, Glimmer Train, The Baffler, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology. Nao’s visual art and drawings have been published in NOON and The Adirondack Review, and her video, digital, and literary installations have been exhibited at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts in Providence, Rhode Island, and at Malmö Konsthall, one of Europe’s largest contemporary art spaces.
Her work is celebrated for its fearless formal experimentation, lyrical intensity, and emotional precision, often navigating the landscapes of displacement, intimacy, and the human body. A former Black Mountain Institute fellow and a recent Iowa Artist Fellow, she lives in Iowa City.​
01.
True to her Vietnamese heritage, Vi Khi Nao possesses distinct physical traits—most notably her black hair—which she allows to express her femininity freely, except when her father, armed with a pair of scissors, steps in to disrupt its symmetry—an intervention that earns her not a stylish set, but rather a swift kick out the door. Her large brown eyes open onto a world she explores with a pen that is both incisive and luminous. Feminine from head to toe, she tirelessly traverses the mysteries of female desire, word after word. It is said that, in her native land, her long back is taken as a sign of laziness. And yet, working without respite, her life is words, and words are her life—words serving as an analgesic for her profound pain.
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Scars she has in abundance! Visible and invisible, spoken and unspoken! They form the fertile soil of her understanding of the world—a place where anyone and everyone can, for the duration of a single reading, find an echo of their own pain. Far from wallowing in self-pity, Vi Khi Nao explores the multifaceted nature of human suffering, seeking to sublimate it and cast it into another realm. Her suffering serves as the marble pedestal upon which she asserts her right to exist in this world unvarnished—armed with nothing but the pure consciousness of who she is: A Poet! A Seer! Yes—yes, I am indeed alluding to Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny.
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For Vi Khi Nao, everything is poetry. She does not view the world merely as a global citizen might. Just try talking to her about the weather—you know, that banal exchange: "It’s hot," "It’s cold." With her, the sun—shining in all its full-throated glory—transforms into a carrot; yet, by the time she manages to reach it to take a bite, it will have vanished, for night will have fallen!
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A protean artist, Vi Khi Nao is, above all, a "Princess of the Clouds." Her poetic sensibility permeates her diverse body of work: novels, short stories, plays, paintings, translations, graphic design, and visual art installations. Ah, Naotian words—an uncommon love affair. Did you know that, with Vi Khi Nao, an addiction to Scrabble metamorphoses into a poetry that explores the subterranean pulse of life and desire? In her collection, My Ardent Love for My Pencil, the poet writes: "I think the first problem with my writing is that I use far too many words." Paradoxical, you might say. Not really; for at every hour of the day—and likely of the night—the poet is engaged in an extraordinary quest: to capture the very essence of an image or a concept, and to reveal, within the visible, their invisible forms! Mind you, do not be led to believe that Vi Khi Nao’s writing belongs to that new genre of "page-turner" literature.
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Free. Vi Khi Nao intends to lead the reader onto the path of their own freedom. This cannot be achieved without a disruption of syntactic, typographic, lexical, and linguistic markers—a disruption that, I know from personal experience, is not without a certain rapture. For the Naotian world is a pristine planet awaiting discovery from north to south, from east to west—with its regions of tenderness and sensuality, its oceans of suffering, its lakes of humor, and its forests of human lives. To read Vi Khi Nao is to embark on a stratospheric journey with zero carbon footprint—an opportunity to cast aside the mask, from the realm of female desire to the very depths of the human soul.
—MARIE GAZEAU, translator of Three Sapphic Movements into French
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02.
It is my great pleasure today to welcome Vi Khi Nao to Pitzer College. She is the author of four poetry collections: Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), the short story collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), and the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
In an essay called “Laziness in Molecular Transformation,” Vi Khi Nao writes, “It's not easy to alter the gravitational force of the existences of others or, more generally, alter the atomic components of a particle through literature.” Vi Khi Nao pours a raw and uncommon electricity into her words, shifting the particles that surround them. Her language is tightly woven out of the body, breath, intelligence, and sound; it also willingly breaks apart and jolts us awake with its myriad trap doors, catapults, and time machines. As with words, she is consistently pushing against the edges of form and genre. Her newest book, Human Tetris, a collaboration with Ali Raz, takes the form of surrealist online dating profiles; in Sheep Machine, each poem corresponds to a single frame in artist Leslie Thornton’s video of the same name; and her novel, Fish in Exile, wildly disrupts linear narrative in its exploration of the grief that follows the accidental death by drowning of the main characters’ two children. Indeed, how can something as final and crude as “the past” exist when it refuses to go away? Is forward motion even an option? Vi Khi Nao writes with a great amount of daring and unflinching curiosity about the animals we are and the animals who surround us, about sex, hunger, birth, death, and greed, about loss and the ways our bodies overlap, consume each other, and break apart. Her writing is both earnest and irreverent, as comfortable with myth and literary allusion as it is with pop culture.
Vi Khi Nao is a writer who takes metaphor very seriously, and as such takes absurdity very seriously, for what about the circumstances of our lives is not absurd? In Fish in Exile, for example, the character Catholic sews small outfits for the two fish who live in the huge aquarium, made by her husband, Ethos, that runs around the perimeter of the living room.
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This “museum of glass” becomes a way for Catholic to reflect on the nature of pain and memory, as she imagines what would happen were the glass to shatter: “Perhaps glass and memories are only painful as fragments or shards. Perhaps if they become diminutive and dusty like sand, they grow very tender and soft and granular and almost loveable. Then pain could slip through me and possibly out of me.” In Vi Khi Nao’s writing, strangeness is a conduit for insight. And so she writes in Sheep Machine, “Hearts blown apart without departing kindness. Would you know these are the words hidden under the skin of sheep?”
Please join me in welcoming Vi Khi Nao to Pitzer College.
------ BRENT ARMENDINGER, author of Street Gloss & The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying
03.
Vi Khi Nao is an artist who transcends medium — one of those rare writers who proves that the acts of making a painting and writing a novel are much closer kin than most people of letters would have you believe.
The first of Nao’s works that I fell in love with were her drawings that appeared in the 2013 NOON. They were images of teapots shape-shifting into women, or women shape-shifting into porcelain — a spout-clad kettle with shapely legs. After pouring over her pictures I went back and read everything she had ever written.
She’s published widely, in every genre someone has been fool enough to confine her in. One gets the sense from all of her works that Nao could be given any set of materials, any language, any confines or paints or stone and she would still be able to figure out a way to break your heart, or make you laugh, or, very possibly, accomplish both at once. In her newest work, Fish in Exile, a novel out this week from Coffee House Press, Nao articulates a narrative of all consuming grief through an impressively large cast of characters that circle around the tragedy of two children drowned at sea.
Since May Nao and I have been writing each other, first by email, then by paper, her from South Bend, IN, then Providence, RI, me from Taos, New Mexico, then San Francisco. In her last letter she wished me the very best wish that anyone could wish another — she wrote “I hope the muse comes to visit you.” May Nao’s remarkable muses come and visit us all.
---- RITA BULLWINKEL, author of Headshot & Belly Up
04.
I am pleased tonight to be able to introduce Vi.
After so many years teaching in the Literary Arts Program I had come to believe, before I met Vi, that nothing could surprise me. I’ve seen in this very theater a fiction writer recount stories in Morse Code by flipping on and off the lights. I’ve seen another fiction writer show the film of her own birth much to the shock of all assembled. And if I began to tell you what I’ve seen poets do in the name of poetry we’d be here all night.
But never until I had met Vi had I seen someone so effectively libidinize the contents of my refrigerator’s crisper drawer. She does this not in the tried and tested Dr. Ruth way, which relies heavily on the cucumber, but by inhabiting the fruits and vegetables themselves, and offering a kind of vegetal sex life complete with consequences that reads like you’re discovering the mores and customs of life on other planets.
Vi’s writing is effervescent and bold, and boldly goes where nobody else seems to go. Indeed, it goes places that, until I met Vi, I didn’t even know were places. And even her stories that start out in recognizable territory, with characters that seem human and have very safe names such as, say, Janet, rapidly enter into strange and original and disturbing territory. Even a story that seems to begin in very strange territory, with the words “There is nothing to eat but the baby” progresses into such strange territory that it makes you wish you could get back to those good old solid days when we were talking about casual cannibalism.
Vi seems willing to try anything, and to try it in ways that other people haven’t. This is perhaps because Vi is a triple threat: she’s not only a capable fiction writer, but also an excellent poet and an accomplished visual artist, and she’s able and willing to cross-pollinate the ideas and logic of one discipline with the forms of another. What she will do tonight, I can’t predict, but I promise it will be 100% vintage Vi, and something well worth experiencing. Please join me in welcoming Vi.
----- BRIAN EVENSON's introduction to Vi Khi Nao for her MFA thesis at Brown University
05.
Vi Khi Nao has published over twenty small press books in the last decade, and has two more coming out later this year. Prolific, without question: her imagination is brimming, and always veering with surprises.
Vi Khi Nao’s most recent novel The Italy Letters is about, among other things, trying to discern the difference “between desire and the collapse of desire,” as well as a study of interpersonal boundaries and abusive generosity. These themes come up in a transatlantic correspondence with a crush (a gay married poet), caring for her suicidal bankrupt mother, racial discrimination on the job market, the end of a friendship with an ex, and perserverence as a writer in the face of poverty. What is the limit to the abuse one writer can put up with?
“Life was treating me like a poem,” Vi Khi Nao writes in the book.“An erasure poem. Slowly, black strips covered where words about me should have been written.” Yet even in her victimhood she still wants “to love life, it seems like a benevolent thing to do, to love something that doesn’t love you back.” This total commitment to working through life’s thorny confusions makes the writing on the page feel bodily, “immersive” even, as one friend describes her writing within the book: it is “highly emotional and physical at the same time.”
Another descriptor I might choose is “ardent” — a word which keeps showing up unexpectedly in the novel: “the ardor of unfairness,” or missing “the ardor of getting to know you,” and “not wanting to submit myself to the ardor of loneliness.” The queer texture of these displaced examples also suggest ardor's homophonic twin: “arduous.” Ardor for arduous: a simultaneous sense of writing as a sphere of passion while also being hard.
Like happily “confusing infinity for handcuffs,” as in the opening poem of Vi Khi Nao’s War is Not My Mother, a collection of experimental “mistranslations,” neither plagiarism nor mimicry but rather “poetic transformations” of canonical poems by other authors, which Vi Khi informs us is “in fact, quite arduous,” especially as she works in as well her mother tongue, Vietnamese. These kinds of constraint-driven projects foreground process and processing. And the thrill for us reading her work is watching for the unexpected sprouts that emerge in the transition; how, through the life of the poem, the imagination powers through ardently.
----- NOA MICHAELA FIELDS, author of E
06.
Today is Wednesday, May 12th, 2021 and I’m in Claremont, California, writing a preface to Vi Khi Nao’s collection of stories, The Vegas Dilemma. I’ve been tasked with this by circumstance, and I think it would best to begin by explaining. Slightly more than a year ago, I attended Vi’s reading at Pitzer College, where she read poetry and prose, including from her collaborative book (with Ali Raz) Human Tetris, which consists of imaginary personal ads, written one per day. She also offered audiovisual evidence of her project of responding to filmmaker Leslie Thornton’s Sheep Machine, which depicts sheep grazing in the Alps, by writing about each individual frame of the film. Vi’s presentation had uncanny quality of insouciance that was delightful. Rather than presenting her work the way a writer typically does, shoving it ahead of themselves like a cowcatcher on a locomotive, or wearing it protectively like a suit of armor, she appeared be standing alongside her work and encountering it with us.
Afterwards – and this is the more important part of this story – Vi and I went out with her host and a few other poets, to eat Italian food at a restaurant where we through the whole dinner we for some reason had to sit on high stools. Vi surprised us by bringing out a flat box with a neat stack of her eloquent pen drawings contained inside. She told us they were for sale and I immediately picked out two for purchase. It was the first time I’d ever used Venmo on my phone. The day afterwards I took them to my office, intending to get them framed and hung. They ended up sitting in a folder on the desk where I placed them that day for over a year.
Vi and I both recall that night as “the last thing that happened before Covid.” I just checked, and it was February 17th, 2020, a little earlier than I might have guessed. There might even have been another night in a restaurant after that, I don’t recall. But there were no further readings, or gatherings after readings. There were certainly no new friendships forged instantly in person. Days later we all went into the year that needs little paraphrase, one of mourning and endurance but also, for those of us lucky enough, reflection. When a PDF of The Vegas Dilemma arrived recently, it felt inevitably like a kind of psychic bookend, or an unfreezing of a moment in time. And when Vi asked me to write something for it, I felt both honored and confused. What kind of preface did this work need? After we spoke on the telephone, however, I began to think of the invitation in a different light. Though this cycle of short stories takes a more traditional outward fictional form, Vi had enlisted me into a small piece of eleventh-hour gesture of collaboration. When we spoke, Vi confirmed what I felt, that the book had retroactively turned into an investigation into a universe about to suffer an enigmatic lull in its frantic activities. While the stories themselves were in no position to directly trace this synchronicity, and how it was echoed in our acquaintance, I was.
So that this preface isn’t strictly self-referential, I’ll say one or two more things about The Vegas Dilemma. Vi Khi Nao’s fictional language is full of magical slippages, which remind me of Jane Bowles, Lydia Davis and Richard Brautigan. As with those writers, an esoteric sadness seeps up through surface deadpan and pizzazz. The stories are self-contained, but also form a cumulative meaning, even if it would be difficult to name directly. The ostensible glamor of Las Vegas reveals an undertow (I accidentally typed “undertown”) of melancholy, which doesn’t resolve, but extends. The word “thighs” seems to be a protagonist in a kind of proto-novel. I want to end by quoting Vi, not from our conversation, but from a wonderful interview in Bomb magazine: “When I produce a work, I don’t view it as transformative. I see it more as an extension—an extension cord. You plug it into the wall, and it can get you only so far, and then you find another cord and add it to it, and you can listen to music a few miles down the road instead of where the outlet is.”
-----JONATHAN LETHEM’s introduction to Vi Khi Nao’s The Vegas Dilemma
07.
I first came to know Vi’s work in 2018 when I read her book, Fish in Exile. This also was the same year I met her for the first time in person when she came to read in LA where I was living at the time. In the years since then, I have written about her work a few times now, and not only have been fortunate to come to know her books and her well in the years since.
I find myself going to Vi’s work for many reasons, but I remember acutely what drew me to her writing in those early encounters. In Vi’s books, I saw her ability to reveal a world in which everything is in relationship to each other—whether human, vegetable, mineral, or spirit. Her writing shows how genius fills into to even the most raw and cracked fits of language, language that morphs power dynamics and illuminates the agency in all things.
Nothing feels taboo or off limits in Vi’s dozens of books. In her poems, emotions—pain, anger, desires, and heartaches, become very real and physical. I think of Vi’s work as preoccupied with experiences of the body—sometimes subtle, sometimes bashing. Sometimes of the stomach, other times of the psyche, if we can even untwine these things. Despite the agony often apparent in Vi’s words, the absurdity of life is also present with all of its ironies and comedies. Vi’s spirit is far too generous to leave us as readers of her work abandoned and hopeless in our problems.
—LAURA PAUL, author of Total Art
08.
De son origine vietnamienne, Vi Khi Nao possède les caratéristiques physiques : cheveux noirs, laissant une féminité s’exprimer librement, sauf quand, de sa paire de ciseaux, son père vient bousculer leur symétrie, ce qui lui vaut non une mise en plis mais plutôt une mise à la porte. Ses grands yeux marron s’ouvrent sur un monde qu’elle explore de sa plume incisive et lumineuse. Féminine des pieds à la tête, elle parcourt les mystères du désir féminin inlassablement mot après mot. Il est dit que son dos long est une preuve de paresse dans son pays natal. Et pourtant travaillant sans relâche, sa vie est mots, les mots sont sa vie. Les mots comme antalgiques à sa profonde douleur.
Des cicatrices, elle en possède ! Des visibles et invisibles, des dites et des non dites ! C’est son terreau fertile en compréhension du monde où chacune et chacun peut, l’instant d’une lecture trouver écho à sa propre douleur. Loin d’un auto-apitoiement, Vi Khi Nao explore les différentes facettes de la souffrance humaine pour la sublimer et la déposer dans un ailleurs. Sa souffrance est le socle de marbre sur lequel elle appuie son droit d’être au monde sans fard. Juste avec la conscience de qui elle est ! Poète ! Voyant.e ! Oui, oui je fais bien référence à la lettre de Rimbaud à Paul Demeny.
Tout est poésie chez Vi Khi Nao. Elle ne voit pas le monde comme une simple citoyenne du monde. Allez lui parler du temps. Vous savez, ce banal : « il fait chaud, il fait froid ». Avec elle, le soleil brillant de tout son lustre, devient une carotte qui, le temps qu’elle arrive à lui pour la déguster, aura disparu puisqu’il fera nuit ! Auteure protéiforme, Vi Khi Nao est avant tout, cette Princesse des Nuées. Sa poésie traverse ses diverses réalisations : romans, nouvelles, théâtre, peintures, traductions, graphismes, installations
d’arts visuels.
Ah les mots Naotiens, une histoire d’amour peu commune. Saviez-vous, qu’avec Vi Khi Nao, l’addiction au Scrabble se métamorphose en une poésie qui explore le battement souterrain de la vie, du désir ? Dans son recueil, My ardent love for my pencil, la poète écrit : « Je pense que le premier problème avec mon écriture est que j’utilise beaucoup trop de mots. » Paradoxal, diriez- vous. Pas tant que ça puisque la poète est à toute heure du jour et problablement de la nuit, dans cette quête inouïe : capter l’essence même d’une image, d’un concept ; révéler dans le visible leurs formes invisibles ! Attention, n’allez pas croire que l’écriture de Vi Khi Nao appartienne à ce nouveau-genre de la littérature tourne-pages.
Libre. Vi Khi Nao entend amener sur le chemin de sa propre liberté, le lecteur. Ce qui ne se fait pas sans un bousculement des repères syntaxiques, typographiques, lexicaux et linguistiques. Bousculement qui ne se fait pas sans un certain ravissement, je le sais - j’en ai fait l’expérience ---- puisque le monde Naotien est une planète vierge à découvrir du nord au sud, de l’est à l’ouest avec ses régions de douceurs, de sensualités, ses océans de souffrances, ses lacs d’humour, ses forêts de vies humaines. Lire Vi Khi Nao, c’est faire un voyage stratosphérique sans empreinte carbonne avec juste l’opportunité de faire tomber le masque du désir féminin à l’âme humaine.
---- MARIE GAZEAU, translator of Trois Mouvements Saphiques into French