Welcome to the world of Vi Khi Nao’s Fish Carcass. ‘A river, not yet employed by the Milky Way, steps into the body of another river— / To change the discourse of time.’ Here poems enact an explicit alchemy, are alive with the self and that-beyond-self. Both personal and impersonal, bold and morphological, her language makes links and unlinks, allows for criticality, delight, horror, and canny humor. A wonderful wild ride.

—HOA NGUYEN, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

 

A furiously inventive lament spiked with wit—a tangy polyvocal plethora—a gut-clench and a soul-check, VKN’s Fish Carcass MRIs her and other creatures’ ills and pleasures. Violence, vulnerability, alienation: no yearning, devotion, touch or light—girl-on-girl, daughter-mother, quester-god—fully offsets this grief, no pop stylings, stunning images, or sexy menus let you metabolize it. Against the heartache and the 10,000 natural shocks that flesh/fish/flora’s heir to, what mode skirts the void? With Taoist, Buddhist, Gnostic, and Presocratic hints, Vi Khi Nao’s Xtreme art goes for wild acuity: ‘We all throw our children into the garbage bins because we / know they have a high tolerance for insomnia.’ This book is deep, hilarious, uncanny, haunting.

—MOYNA PAM DICK, author of I am writing you from afar

 

Fish Carcass is a mastication of beauty and love. It is credulous, demanding answers to questions we haven’t begun to think of yet: Should a sapling die for love of moonlight? Is suicide and 159 hours working overtime diligent? Is it possible for lettuce to be spanked by whale oil? Vi Khi Nao’s poetry is cunning, bold, and flagrant; slicing through flank and driving into marrow.

—DAISUKE SHEN, author of Vague Predictions & Prophecies

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The unglamorous labor of ‘logging’ footage is, like childbirth, often seen as a necessary torment best forgotten once its productive work is done. But in Sheep Machine, a reverse log of Leslie Thornton’s video work of the same name, Vi Khi Nao empowers this deceptively objective art of time-coded naming (‘00:00 Pitch-black,’ ‘00:01 This is wheat & grass’) with a wild heart, a deep ethics, and the slant-philosophical poetics that returns me continuously to her gorgeous, necessary (and frankly addictive) work. Nao demonstrates, again and again, how—when seen through her grace-shaped lens—‘[e]ven wheat becomes wild.’

—ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS, author of They and We Will Get Into Trouble for this: Poems

 

Vi Khi Nao’s poetic ekphrasis of Leslie Thornton’s Sheep Machine is a visceral companion to an optical theatre of ordinary and extraordinary images that rub off the burning edge of consciousness. Frame by frame, the reader is taken to experience perception as beauty when ‘grass bends itself to experience paradise’ or metamorphosis of sober solitude into ventriloquial mediation and meditation, ‘as if to breathe resurrection.’ This is hallucinatingly generative work. Here’s your flight through Vi Khi Nao’s language machine.

—DONG LI, author of The Orange Tree

 

Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine feels to me like an intricate re-lensing of the very process of seeing. Beauty, and horror, can shapeshift from second to second. Beauty, or reality, can transmogrify from organic to mechanistic, word to word, image by subtly shifting image. The line between object as object—far removed and bucolic as a sheep in the grass—and object as something terrifying in its power to obfuscate, mesmerize, or horrify is constantly evolving in these pages. As Nao inventively and with painstaking patience transposes image to the obtuse realm of text, the gaze becomes an action we tumble into, that kaleidoscopes intricacies of vision—or in-sight—spinning away within us. In this manner the poet challenges us to keep our seeing alive: ‘To pull back the gaze is to say: I am done with being a machine.’

—DAO STROM, author of Instrument

 

Sheep Machine is a series of ekphrastic poetic essays that act as a portal into the luminous power of perception. Within three minutes of observing hypnotic images of sheep grazing on a mountainside, we encounter a world in which blades of wheat ‘perform like semi-phantom needles, drinking in the earth’s health and drilling the air with an intangible caress,’ and enter a landscape where we are able ‘to see the terror tucked on the side of the pastured mountain.’ Through diligent, rich, and elegant description, Sheep Machine slides through philosophical discourse on suffering, volition, and intimacy. Vi Khi Nao’s utterly original voice penetrates the mundane with brilliant, erotic, fanciful observation grounded in perspicacious humanity. Here is a gaze of dynamic stillness where we ‘[l]ook at how strong the shadows breathe on the insides of the sheep’s legs.’ As the seconds tick by in Sheep Machine, we are drawn into a mesmerizing exploration of what it means to be profoundly and urgently awake.

—ALISON PRINE, author of Loss and Its Antonym

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Vi Khi Nao's latest is a closet drama in which the closet is the mind, the mind's eye, the cosmos, an x-ray, an x-ray machine, an intimacy, a little cell that wants to split in two but can't make up its mind. Is it I, or is it AI? Only the most infinitesimal instrument can tell, and she's not telling.

—​JOYELLE MCSWEENEY, author of Toxicon and Arachne 

 

In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao blows up the "who's on first" humor of Beckett's classic, creating a hypertrophic aperture through which all of our current moment-our disappointments, our romances, our violences, and, yes, our deities-pours out. At times it is philosophical, hilarious and dadaistic. It is a bawling, brawling portrait of our time that refuses to ever cohere into the kind of static quality that "portrait of our time" suggests.

—JOHANNES GORANSSON, author of Poetry Against All: A Diary 

 

Take this x-ray / time machine. This body. Its desire to reconcile its inner and outer selves. It's gender that misses its old gender. An ancient depression. A conversation about God or a goat or a goat God and the myth that we most constantly live in through all dimensions-the one about how and why we go on if no one loves us. If not ourselves. In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao brilliantly calls into question all of our beliefs, our many ways of being, with a blood-thinning, acid-slick humor that tremors through a lively wild and sometimes wooly cast of characters as they quite literally roam across the page. Vi Khi Nao's work demands a kind of attention we so rarely give to the multilayered reality written into the body. Is this a play that queers Beckett? Perhaps. Is this a play passionate about the art of carrying story? Its shock collar of pain? Its screaming into the bra cup void of delight? Absolutely.

—​JEN ROUSE, author of Riding with Anne Sexton 

 

Nao's play takes Beckett's canonical Waiting for Godot and masterfully has it perform magic she taught it in secret (via radiography, in the galvanic space between surgeon and patient). You may find yourself flabbergastedly confronted with the cinema of time. It is an absolute delight.

—​SARAH BURGOYNE, author of Because the Sun

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Vi Khi Nao’s WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER is a descriptive “chimerical metal, ferocious ambient voice, [and] saliva-bearing” world; certainly it illustrates its “…Postmodern Twist for the Classic Craft” in how its speech creates astonishing turns and images that give us a sentience, but that turn away from traditional “crafted” images. To borrow from Cvetkovich, Nao's collection is a “feel tank." Poems hold a multiplicity of texts and allusions, and each one is “wrapped in moisture and rime, like a chthonic present” and teaches us about the underworld’s posterity. Early in the collection we are presented with an essential question: “To be with me or to toss me in a war zone, does it matter?” It does, because we stay with Nao throughout, even as we unmoor in witnessing the pain here, we see the deepening embodiment of language that excavates a vitality emerging out of survival. 

—PRAGEETA SHARMA, author of Grief Sequence

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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]

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Vi Khi Nao’s The Vegas Dilemma is a kaleidoscopic jaunt through the lives of the outcasts and artists and lovers who reside in the city of sin. Nao’s prose is as sharp and strange as a buried blade. The Vegas Dilemma answers the question I’ve been asking myself for years: what would happen if Robert Walser time-traveled to modern day Vegas? You won’t regret reading these stories.  

—ALEX MCELROY, author of The Atmospherians

 

The more I read Vi Khi Nao the more i come to feel she is one of those writers with a tinged mind, like a Brautigan, an Inger Christensen. But more i should say these stories find ethics in their mutating formal design and i read these at a moment of exasperation with fiction,  if it cannot stoop to be subsumed by ethics in a crisis. To name the names. Mark Zuckerberg. Kavanaugh. Spit, spit! And part of this ethic, also, is this flexing of wormholes, maybe probed by color, by incendiary metaphor-- a sudden cottontail. Or how each piece here is shaped for (whimsical, grave) escape. 

—CAREN BEILIN Caren Beilin, author of Revenge of the Scapegoat

 

In conventional fiction, characters are amplified by what they consume, the places that surround them. In The Vegas Dilemma, a novel-in-stories, objects and places become characters themselves—active agents of a state that advertises the possibility of authentic human connection and abundance, but whose destructive drive to consume everything (and everyone) within it finally denies intimacy. People in this hyper-real Vegas objectify and are objectified in turn, becoming, in Nao’s words, “human mirror, human pillowcase, human chopstick, human sweater, human bathrobe.” These strange, compelling and hallucinatory stories expose the dehumanizing and ultimately lonely racial, sexual and class politics of contemporary America. 

—PAISLEY REKDAL, author of Appropriate: A Provocation

 

With handfuls of cheerios and memories of bibimbap, nao’s stories restlessly wander the nocturnal streets, like a Jeanne Moreau in Vegas, desiring and dreading connection and intimacy. Tender and gimlet eyed, with the faintest whiff of desiccated despair, the prose is polished to perfection. A piercing and haunting book. 

—JEFFREY DESHELL, author of Masses and Motets

 

Each of Vi Khi Nao’s stories drops you flatfooted into a new world, finding yourself in a universe at once recognizable and fantastical, poetic and political. Each story lends its hand to a larger whole, but stands alone as an artifact of a place that never quite existed. These stories should be read slowly—each one a puzzle i found myself delighted to solve. 

—ADRIANA E. RAMIREZ, Pen/Fusion Award winning author of Dead Boys

 

The Vegas Dilemma is a saucy dinner date you wouldn't take for spaghetti. Vi Khi Nao has finally tackled impossibility and solved it. The gaze of this collection is toward a pile of raw and intimate donuts of temporality. 

—ALI RAZ, author of Human Tetris

 

The Vegas dilemma reminds me of riding buses in Santa Fe, or my first morning off in NYC when I foolishly ordered a cup of coffee and started reading war and peace at a crowded midtown diner with a line that curved into the street. It reminds me of sitting in public spaces, anxiously, expecting that I’d soon be asked to leave or warily aware of some stranger in the periphery or some stranger who sits too close to me, or the stranger who relentlessly abducts my regard and stuffs it in his luggage compartment, where so much pleasure is sought and so much pleasure sold, and skirting this are the Starbucks, the bus stops, the panda express, a very specific loneliness. 

—JESSICA ALEXANDER, author of Dear Enemy,

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Vi Khi Nao’s language isn’t made of words like everyone else’s. This can’t be true, so it must be that Vi Khi Nao has found a way to sensitize words into a phase change, into a state of semantic overflow. Nao’s sentences proceed via floral, clitoral, littoral surges. I love this book for its texture, its granular absurdities, its aqueous erotics, its garlic paper longing. I’ve never felt anything like it.

—JOANNA RUOCCO, author of Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith

 

After losing my father to suicide i was given many very thoughtful books about why we sometimes kill ourselves; none of them, even in sum, carried the insight, vision, or credibility of Vi Khi Nao’s Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche. Achingly un-sentimental, extensively researched, exquisitely illustrated, and overflowing with personal wisdom (and, most importantly, warmth), suicide inhabits a truly novel numbering system to chart a kind of star map to the present condition, a guide to failure, an ode to other people; a way, if we stick together, to survive. 

—DANIEL UNCAPHER, author of American Pomology

 

Vi Khi Nao’s Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche confronts the universal question of suicide with a scientific curiosity, mathematical precision, and visionary vulnerability that is uniquely their own, and will leave a lasting impression on any reader--especially those who know all-too-well the weight of the titular subject in their lives.

—RANDALL SCOTT

 

Vi Khi Nao traces all the ways suicide twisted around her family, her education, her art, and her heart condition in this brilliant memoir. It’s a revealing and honest account of her “suicidal scars of the soul” and the devastating effect that illness has on a life.

—ANTHONY LUEBBERT

 

Imagine turning yourself—your whole body—inside-out, all the way, so that the you inside of you, i.e. every connected, reclusive, and/or unfathomable organ, cell, humor, sense, memory, affection and idea, became your new skin, profile and comportment. Then imagine looking and feeling, in that quasi-möbius and uncannily porous transposition, more like yourself than you ever felt before. Vi Khi Nao’s A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line is, for me, the transcendent, coruscating art of that sensation.

—BRANDON SHIMODA, author of the Grave on the Wall

 

Vi khi nao is such a wildly singular writer, it’s always a breathless romp. I would give her the last pen in my quiver and know that she’ll jolt us right out of our shirts, our pants, our sweaty and shimmering skin.

—SAWAKO NAKAYASU, author of Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From

 

With formal experimentation and direct beckoning, Vi Khi Nao, draws us into this collection ripe with sound, sorrow, and sensuality. A bell curve is a pregnant straight line is a lyric calendar punctuated with playful wit and answers to questions you hadn’t even thought to ask. The queer erotic is savored here—slurped like ‘sapphở.’ nao builds an anthropomorphized architure, and within it we find a certain uncanny order to things. ‘but even intimate objects move.’ in a bell curve is a pregnant straight line, nao shows us that strangeness, amplified, can midwife new clarity and light up our dark mortal corners.

—ALICIA MOUNTAIN, author of High Ground Coward

 

The inimitable genius of vi khi nao is on full display in a bell curve is a pregnant straight line. Once immersed in her sensorium perception is heightened to the point of ecstatic convergence. The dramatic details are resplendent, volatile. Insight flashes like a searchlight. The poignancy of scintillation is “an iridescent hallucinogen” in dappled lines of brilliance. Interspersed throughout are vi’s enigmatic line drawings; the totality of this book is mesmerizing and astounding. 

—BRENDA IIJIMA, author of Animate, Inanimate Aims

 

Can poems be funny? I believe that Vi Khi Nao would say “yes!” I loved reading this work: it made me laugh, it made me want to write, it made me want to regard every single thing—the wood pile, a sweater, this table—as a thing alive and singing. Yes, singing because I don’t know when, since listening to mad villain/mf doom, I have encountered rhymes so delicious. Another striking thing about this collection is space. How delicately placed lacunae shape the page, making us really read each word and then savor the connections between: the joy of jumping the synapse. This savoring and active connection-making matters. “matter” like “material” and “matrix” and "mother," Bracha Ettinger reminds us, which is the weaver’s basis, the pre-modern grid where separate strands make a surface. And so this book is filled with webs and knots, crochet and cuts, shoulder pads and even skorts—a true hybrid. This is life as a big flexible bag of textile thought and utterance, a good shape for ease and difficulty, two textures that these poems and drawings make in the same time. 

—JILL MAGI, author of Threads and Labor

 

I believe in the ferocious, carnal and vegetal humanity of Vi Khi Nao’s writing. Each new book adds to a quivering, entangled body of work and A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line is my new favorite. It’s grief-stunned, erotic, and wild. In nao’s lines, with their veering and encompassing ways, “no lover is solid” and yet the poet’s gaze is “a potent, sapphic one”. The title poem took my breath away, and even describes the process by which that happened: “her tears reach into my ribs / & pull out every single breath out of my chest”. When you finish reading this blurb you should wash yourself in the coolness of its sobs: “anything that / rhymes with the human pit.” Incredible.

—JARED STANLEY, author of Book Made of Forest

 

Vi’s imagination oozes sex, buzzes with technology, gobbles food, and dances with goddesses, literary figures, a balloon artist, ancestors, and sapphic ghosts. These poems grab me by the ovaries. I needed this corporeal poetry, poetry sloshing with fluids and brave bodies, at this very moment.

—KRISTY LIN BILLUNI, content creator of The Sexy Grammarian

 

In the tree of life that is its cover (art rendered by Sophia Trinh). In its heart given to moving forms of life by way of words working unheard hearings across audibility thresholds. In its forwarding messages’ message secreted inside the lexicon. 

                                                          the woman descends

                                                          into the tent called

                                                          black pearl.

Vi Khi Nao’s eye-ear-tongue finds inside finding the sounds that weren’t there a minute before when we checked in on them to see if they were ok. She has sent them into other orbits, while we were distracted by what we thought we knew was this Amerenglish dictionary sharing its existence with us. 

—STEVE DICKISON, author of Inside Song 

 

These poems are clever meals, feeding us the jumpy truth about our inner longings. Devilish reminders that love is often just a combination of peculiar proclivities—reassurances that desire is always particular and unflinchingly weird. 

—RALUCA ALBU, Bomb Magazine

 

Me: Middle-aged writer, mind-softened by early summer heat, weary of humankind. You: Tender word orgy, prickly song, mesmerizing game, thrilling voice of multiples. 

—NATHANIEL POPKIN, Cleaver Magazine

 

In Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz vertically-integrated collaborative text, all subjectivity is a game of Human Tetris. 

—LOUIS ARMAND, Director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, Charles University, Prague

 

What is Human Tetris by Vi Khi Nao and Ali Raz? A series of poems starring supreme anti-beings? Ultra-compressed and data-moshed versions of a(n) supposed ancient-Future? A sideways ethnographics of 21st century computer-simulated un-realities? Or, is it simply a self-eating parasite that could only exist in a digital Vantablack-tinged Dark Ages of the soon-to-be artifact’d meta-apocalypse? Maybe it is all of the above? Just know, with this text, Nao and Raz have perfectly encapsulated what it means, on the Kardashev scale, to (still) be a Type 0 Civilisation. Please shelve under: forward-thinking, outré, books where the Internet is pro(?)/antagonist and absolutely (like, I’m-still-fucking-shook) terrifying.

—MIKE KLEINE, Author of Kanley Stubrick and Lonely Men Club

 

Flirting with the absurdity of dating through digital devices culled from analogue word counts of print personals, Human Tetris catalogues kinks into an abundance so normal that poetry wins as ultimate release valve.

—ARIEL GOLDBERG, Author of The Estrangement Principle             




ME: wondering how two people can connect over off-kilter internet banter.

HUMAN TETRIS: Proving anything can happen if you just click send.

You might have to turn it, but this piece will fit in your life.

—CHRIS MARGOLIN, The Poetry Question




Human Tetris is as complex as anything either writer has accomplished and impossibly more so for their successful layering here. It’s a wild book, a fun book, and an informative book on the state of our blurred selves in the modern world.

—GRANT MAIERHOFER, Author of Peripatet and Drain Songs




Human Tetris is a building lattice of interlocking online identities, exposing themselves at all times yet still coming off as detached by sheer geography, sheer facelessness, sheer screenname anonymity. Like the curated spaces we lurk on the internet, it is as tongue-in-cheek as it is terrifyingly sincere, and you won't be able to look away. Get ready for a new scale of globalized game impossible to sit right in. This book doesn't offer playing rules, but little breadcrumbs to a final triumph forever out of reach--like a photo log of a star long dead, or a defunct message board about a movie that never reached release. All our forgotten diaries are still out there. Human Tetris imagines them stacking all the way up and filling the future with want.

—DYLAN KRIEGER, Author of Giving Godhead and The Mother Wart




“Love is a transaction and I’m applying for a job. I’m applying to / your opening.” These poems are an earnest reminder of how extravagantly weird any honest self-portrait should be / weirder still when the ideal audience of that self-portrait is meant to be a fantasy / a soul-mate / or simply an opportunity crackling flashing the other end / of the dating app / of the text. What is it to be seen / to be viewed / devoured / loved? What a peep into the center of the flower / what a delight.

—CARRIE LORIG, Author of The Pulp vs. The Throne

 

This manuscript. What is it? What is it? The laying out of a life along the razor’s edge of its own annihilation. An investigation of the conditions of its possibility. A reflection on famous suicides. Famous non-suicides. The illnesses within which health is inscribed. Memoir punctuated by image, number, text. Each word a brush stroke. Every metaphor a fatty lump. Constrained by the infinite sprawl of π,  Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche opens as a wound into a mind working through what it means to live by passing through the identical question of what it means to die. 

—FAR WALL

 

Suicide would be an encyclopedic novel if encyclopedic novels were not boring and if instead of trying to capture the full range of the world’s knowledge—like Dante, Joyce, or Pynchon—they attempted to capture instead what knowledge feels like on the brink of death and the cosmic and pragmatic love it takes to keep each other living. Vi Khi Nao knows, too, how short life is and kept it under 153 pages.

—CLOSE WALL

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In this sublime re-imagining of the classic Grimm fairy tale "The Six Swans," Vi Khi Nao weaves a new form of fiction marked by its bold presentation of femininity and desire.

—LAURA MILLER

 

SIHM is a poignant love story that is certain to entertain you and bring warmth to your heart. The author will leave you with a renewed awakening of your senses. SIHM is undoubtedly a book that has is deserved of a five star rating. Simply an epic story that is a must read. 

—MICHAEL REEVES

 

Swans In Half-Mourning is brimming with intoxication. The humor was as startling and fresh as the images the humor relied upon. I thoroughly enjoyed the inventive characterizations of God and his general forays into the characters' sphere. I was repeatedly struck by the landscapes of language, which I continue to inhabit beyond the page. Vi Khi Nao is a writerly Wonder Woman from another dimension.

—KELLY P

 

It might be called The Book of Surrender or The Burning Book of Radiant Glass. It might be called Swan Obsidian or The Book of Umbrella or The Iceland Book of Lake and Feather or Incineration. I really don't know because I found story so thoroughly and seductively cancelled here. Here I was allowed to forget for a while that that is what books aspire to tell, so taken was I by more enthralling and mysterious pleasures.

—CAROLE MASO, author of AVA

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Gentle reader: Vi Khi Nao is a mind-cannibal. She will eat your brain. The night (reading this is precisely a night) will start out as a cool sleepover, where an older sibling regales you with charged stories that brave the edges of legality, combusting hormones and Pop Tarts in arabesques of the sacred and snark-attacks of mouth-made, explosive blats… narrative loops increasingly about everything ever, the way a bottle of wine is everything, in potential… Then You will try and pull your thoughts together; you will try and look back to see where you’ve been; in realizing you are only here now, there is no was, you will turn back to the present and that will be gone too. You will be demented. Language will have done it to you. The piece starts out as a fairy-tale feeding on myth meat – a lark (or swan) of a story that tilts over to a psychic origin myth if the psyche were a mutant superhero and you had an infinite bowl of cereal to eat as you watched the Saturday morning cartoon of it. Then – cards fall out of the sleeves and the organ bellows breaks; the mad swarming carnies and hucksters that are these paragraphs launch away centripetally from any central own scam, and sex, society - all shape flies loose into the opportunity of a night deeper than sarcasm and as uncertain as desire. You will wake up changed by an older sibling who has just run away from home.

—ERIK EHN, an American playwright and director known for proposing the Regional Alternative Theatre movement

 

Swans in Half-Mourning is creative and smart. The author’s intelligence shines through which made me desire a new and improved brain. I was left wanting, wishing I could competently do something such as this. The original fables had to be googled and researched for the proper read along. Overall I was left strung out and satisfied by the work.

—TIMOTHY GAGER, author of The Shadows of the Seen

 

Reading Vi Khi Nao’s writing is like ravenously eating a cake containing every expressive and erotic possibility in all the world. “Swans” exceeds our hopes for literature as for romance. Consensual physical terrains go up in sweet smoke as desire effortlessly rules a new landscape. So easily I can forget the other world and slip down this red throat. Just when you haven’t breathed for a while, there’s some humor, some spandex. It’s only life. It’s only true love. I truly love it.

—DIA FELIX, author of YOU YOU YOU

   

Perhaps Swans in Half-Mourning is best read with a needle and thread in hand in order to sew a thread through words like ‘eyelash’ and ‘marshmallow’ and ‘cork’ and ‘voice’, so that after the book is finished, the reader may then follow the sewn trail back to the beginning. That is to say, it’s a book best read ten times, with new eyes and new skin each time. Then you might find the eucalyptus that is long burning. Otherwise, to only read it once, is to read a swan. To read it twice is to find a person. To read it three times, is to find a swan again, but this time wearing a shirt stained with tears. Chapter XCVI (Which, backwards says Vi Sees X (Or, as I read it, ‘Vi Marks the Spot’)) is a treat.

—ANTHONY LUEBBERT

     

God is on his knees, his monarchal butt cheeks pointing at the empyrean theater of human existence." Chances are any sentence you pick out at random from "Swans In Half-Mourning" will be as good as the one above. Vi Khi Nao's writing is skillfully controlled for maximum impact; the ellipses in between her sections as evocative as the images in her text. With taut and always surprising language, she delivers maximum pleasure. If you like Diane Williams, you'll definitely dig Vi Khi Nao. This is one for luxuriating.

—LEE YEW LEONG, founder of ASYMPTOTE