Love for the Pencil
Today is the official release of My Ardent Love for the Pencil, a collection of poems, with photos, by Vi Khi Nao, a marvelous poet with books out from 11:11, Coffee House, Melville House, and several other fine presses, a list that now includes Malarkey.
I’m spending the morning packing books to put in the mail. If you’d like one of them to go to you you can use the code LOVEFORTHEPENCIL at checkout when ordering a copy of My Ardent Love for the Pencil. We have a few signed copies still available so you might even get one of those. I’ll be sending a sticker and a copy of King Ludd’s Rag No. 24 with each copy as well. The new KLR features stories by Tori Rego and J. Edward Gregal, plus the print incarnation of Good Reads, where I write notes about books, stories, or poems I’m reading. This one examines a poem from Taco Bell Quarterly.
For what it’s worth, after having not really read from Vi’s collection for a while, the other day I was reading some Wallace Stevens and something in it took me straight to Pencil. I think it is a special book. Printed on the nicest paper, it is a delight to hold and feel, but that all melts away when you dive into the words, which are filled with humor, sadness, and wonder.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a cool city, you can pick up a copy of the book at Powell’s, Arundel Books, Milkweed Books (in the very city where the first edition of the book was printed!), Alienated Majesty, Open Books: A Poem Emporium, and Jarvis Square Books. Those are some of the ones I know have some copies. Powerhouse in Brooklyn might also have copies, if they didn’t sell them all at the book launch on Wednesday.
If you don’t live near one of those bookstores, the United States Postal Service is here for you, and I can hook you up with a free zine and sticker, and actually you can also throw some extra books into your order if you’re feeling really literary; our shipping is $5 flat, so more books = saving on shipping.
Read some selections from My Ardent Love for the Pencil.
Order My Ardent Love for the Pencil.
I will leave you with some love for the pencil:
"Vi Khi Nao is an unstoppable genius.”
— Garielle Lutz
"Once again, Vi Khi Nao models an achievement of possibilities: 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