Hélène Cixous once explored the shattering impact of "body words," the passionate literary expressions of deeply embodied individuals. Nao, in REVERSE ABYSS, embraces Cixous's call and expands upon it, challenging convalescing notions of health, strength, pain, and survival. These categories limit us within language's prison, casting the speaker as a heroic survivor or longsuffering witness. Nao resists such constraints, employing her body words in a more fervent, sapphic pursuit. She questions how the body communicates, whether suffering and love share the same language, and how physical agony sounds, varying with its origin. REVERSE ABYSS, written before and after heart surgery, blends languages—Vietnamese, Vietlish, English, mathematics—seeking a unique queer idiolect that aptly captures life-saving medical experiences. Within this mournful manuscript, scabs shed from scarred flesh become preserved artifacts, medical terminology transforms into concrete poetry, mathematical symbols reshape (re-form/deform) linguistic syntax, and pain's dual nature finds expression in forty-two variations of "my dear” or “em ơi!”​

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