Nao’s book urges readers to understand seeing as a cultural construct rife with imbalances of power, agency, and visibility. […] By rendering language and its implicit hierarchies suddenly strange, Nao forces readers to look more closely. Through its innovative style and aggressive attention to detail, the project succeeds in unearthing extraordinary possibilities, resulting in a work that exists as an ‘important acuity’ in the face of ‘today’s technological age.’

—Publishers Weekly [Starred Review]

 

Vi Khi Nao's fictional language is full of magical slippages ... an esoteric sadness

seeps up through surface deadpan and pizzazz. 

—JONATHAN LETHEM

 

Nao’s writing is sensual, metaphysical, painterly … she writes scathing portraits

of a world alive with emotion and intellect.” 

—BOMB Magazine

 

Nao invites her readers to occupy the world through a masterful deconstruction

and reconstruction of her medium.

—THE BELIEVER

 

The poems of The Old Philosopher are keen and bright; sharp like ice in winter, these seemingly fractured lines perform the strangest roles. I believe in all the wicked wisdom contained here. Vi Khi Nao risks much she weights each line with deep spiritual and emotional resonance, yet the voice of the poems never fails to surprise. The opening section of quirky, lacerating lyrics give way to a deceptively quiet series of narrative poems that only serve to show how fully language can come to inhabit lived experience without compromising one stitch of poetry s power to de-center and disturb. The collection closes with a masterful prose sequence that fuses the various approaches of the poems that came before. Political, prayerful, peripatetic, the work of Vi Khi Nao feels so necessary, so intense, so immediately now. 

—KAZIM ALI, Judge's Citation

 

Even if you think you are hallucinating, you are not, the lights actually are bouncing / Off a panther s undulating / Back. The pain is real, the dreams are real, and so is the sewing machine. People are just no longer used to a glass mountain that doesn t shatter. We have grown more accustomed to the mountain having simply been removed. We may have already forgotten that god is a child / who pretends to pray / because in the midst of his holy make-believe childhood / he is a beautiful version of daffodil twirling in dew. We are no longer used to the heart s engine revving with such quiet, lonely, insistent, anatomical intensity. Not so many people have traveled in Vi Khi Nao's language mind before. Here is your ticket, a vagrant fragrance. 

— C.D. WRIGHT

 

Once again, Vi Khi Nao models an achievement of possibilities in A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line that is nothing short of a miracle for the future of the body: an avalanche of the imagination that disintegrates the lines separating feelings from thought, the spirit from the natural world, and reveals how language, light and touch thread us into fuller sense of ourselves. Reading this book is to be shrouded in her magic and to experience the likelihood of floating, especially at the level of the eye and desire.

— MAJOR JACKSON, author of The Absurd Man

 

Vi Khi Nao is an unstoppable genius. The Vegas Dilemma is zanily transporting and deliriously original. No other writer has ever had me gasping this many times on every page.

— GARIELLE LUTZ, Author of Worsted

 

I'm paralyzed by the brilliance of Vi Khi Nao's Oh, God, Your Babies are so Delicious. Her stories - like Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Chiara Barzini - are stunning in that they are filled with majestic lines and disturbing images that stay with you for a long time. I read this book in one sitting and will return to it.

— BRANDON HOBSON, Author of Where the Dead Sit Talking

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Imagine an entity composed of sheep, wheat, assholes, clitorises, stars. Why not? That would be this poem, this world — a perfectly recognizable post-human world which is also post surreal. Vi Khi Nao is making it new, no, she is doing the old job of making us see what’s already here in a new way. We’re already part of the bunny-frog and the sheep machine and we’re feeling fine. This [Umbilical Hospital] is bold, fresh, necessary work.

—RAE ARMANTROUT 

 

How rare, how wonderful, when a book [A Brief Alphabet of Torture] arrives with the ambition and desire of this one, such a complete set of interests, fully lacking the pitfalls and pratfalls which typically characterize its innovative ilk. The work is animate in its aims, pressing you to go on. Speaking as someone who has seen what it can do, I’d suggest you do as it says.

—AMELIA GRAY, author of Isadora, Gutshot, and Museum of the Weird

 

Donald Barthelme said that he wanted to be on the leading edge of the junk phenomenon, and with these exquisite effervescent, eviscerating fictions of A Brief Alphabet of Torture, Vi Khi Nao is out there with him, whittling away at the whole anatomic nominative scrapheap of our layered and laminated lexicon. Edgy, you bet! These pieces are elaborate piecework—perforated, whip stitched, and distressed field-dressed dissections of language. Tortured? Maybe. But lusciously junked and juxtaposed, turned inside out and every which way but…No, in every way they make way. These tales tax and tantalize, a taxidermy of turnt transcendence.

—MICHAEL MARTONE, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana

 

Jagged and unforgettable. Refusing sentimentality and realism, [Nao] shows how personal devastation can feel, to the sufferer, as powerful and enduring as myth.

—VIET THANH NGUYEN

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Prose as sharp and strange as a buried blade. 

—ALEX MCELROY, author of The Atmospherians

 

Vi Khi Nao [creates] "a universe at once both recognizable and fantastical,

poetical and political."

—ADRIANA E RAMÍREZ, author of Dead Boys

 

Nao . . . blends prose and poetry in her heart-wrenching novel about a couple grieving for their two dead children.

—BBC

 

[Nao’s] sentences roll in and surround like a thick fog, dampening, chilling, becoming in certain moments, wholly iridescent.

—THE BOSTON GLOBE

 

Fish in Exile manipulates form as a means to exploring its themes thoroughly.

—THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

 

Vi Khi Nao has created a meditation that splits open the numbing and disorienting problems of loss and mourning with language that breathes new life into an old suffering.

—THE MILLIONS

 

Fish in Exile melts traditional academic narrative with magic and folklore, creating an unforgettable story that reminds the reader there is no universally correct approach to dealing with grief.

—THE RUMPUS

 

A magical and fresh perspective on grief, this beautiful book is like nothing you've ever read before. 

—BUSTLE

 

It’s an extreme feat of economy and vision that Vi Khi Nao was able to so robustly depict the aftermath of the death of one’s child in such a fascinating and exciting set of sentences and logic.

—VICE

 

For all the weightiness of its subject matter, Fish in Exile is also surprisingly light on its feet: eccentric, absurd, and delightfully wry. This book wriggles with so much originality and life, it'll have you hooked from the very start. 

—BUZZFEED

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