My Ardent Love for My Ardent Love for the Pencil
Sometimes I look forward to a short book, especially if I’ve been working on a longer project, or running behind, or, more frequently, both. Finally, a shortie. I can get it laid out in a couple hours and cross another thing off my list. I make a lot of lists, and crossing off items is the key to my sanity. Rarely do I get everything crossed off of one list before I make a new list. So the day comes. That big book that took me forever to edit and longer to lay out and that required eighty-seven bookmarks and internal links in the ebook file is put to bed and that nice short book I’ve been dangling over my head like a carrot is finally at hand and it’s almost never as easy as I had told myself it would be. Think about how boring life would be, though, if everything was as easy as we’d hoped. Here’s a line from one of those short books: “Sometimes a sign of things going bad when it is going too well!” Things are almost never going too well, and if they are it almost always means disaster. We sold a hundred preorders on day one? Great, we’ll need the money because we’re about to find out the four boxes of books we just ordered have the interior and outside margins mixed up so we’re going to have to redo the book and replace all those copies. True story, one of several mishaps and misfortunes that almost ended this press.
The reason the big books take so long to get ready is that they’re big, and there’s so much you have to do, so much you have to look for, and talk about with the author, which all takes time. The reason the short books never go as quickly as I delude myself they will is that you can’t coast through a book, no matter how short. Each one requires care and thought and discussion and sample pages and a million files being shared back and forth until you run out of internet for the month (shout out to satellite internet, with special thanks to my county for spending $12 million from a USDA grant on laying fiber optic cable but only in select areas—town, and the big farms).
Going off on tangents about mishaps and satellite internet was not on my list; this is just where my brain went for some reason. The book I quoted from above is My Ardent Love for the Pencil. It is a collection of poems, intertwined with photos taken by the author, Vi Khi Nao.
“Vi Khi Nao is an unstoppable genius.”
—Garielle Lutz
I wasn’t sure what to do with this manuscript for a while. It was poetry, but it wasn’t contained in clearly demarcated poems the way I am used to. In some ways it’s one long poem, interrupted by shorter poems that may or may not stand alone, but I don’t think I would say it definitively is one long poem. Another way to look at is it’s a series of aphoristic fragments, mostly meditating on a shared theme. The jacket copy says that “Vi Khi Nao’s silky, liminal, novella-like poems dissolve the boundaries between photography, love, and literature, merging them into a single, pulsing reality—where a pencil is a lover, friendships and family flicker like matchsticks in a typhoon, and literature hacks up dry ink like a body straining against emphysema.” Vi actually wrote that copy. Sometimes I write the copy; sometimes the author writes it and then I edit it because writing about your own book is hard. But Vi nails it.
Like most of the books we publish, My Ardent Love for the Pencil is hard to describe in one catchy, social media-friendly pitch. You have to spend time with it. And the more time I’ve spent with this book, the more I’ve come to love it. And, naturally, I ended up spending more time with it than I anticipated. The book is only 72 pages. You’d think the layout would be a snap but it took a long time. It’s not that it was an inherently difficult project, only that like every book it requires so much care, so much back-and-forth. This is my favorite part of running this press: working on the books with the writers, getting to know their personalities, getting to know their voices. There are small press duties I don’t like much, but this I love.
Our approach to the layout of this book was casual; rather, our approach was serious, but the aesthetic was casual. Layout is important because it is how the book will look and it is how the reader will interact with it. It’s something I take very seriously, in part because indie books still have a reputation for sloppy layout, and I had to resist the urge to make everything look perfect. Perfect would not have fit our aesthetic. It may or may not look it, but I spent hours on this book just getting the spacing right, and there are a few lines in the book that kind of kill me because they go against everything I know about typesetting; in another book, I would never let them stand as they are, isolated on the page in a way that makes you wonder, is this the end of the poem on the previous page, or the start of a new poem on this page, but in this one they work. They have to be like that. Vi wanted the poems, the fragments, to be continuous, to flow into each other. They are individual pieces but part of a larger whole. They dissolve the boundaries between photography, love, and literature, merging them into a single, pulsing reality—where a pencil is a lover, friendships and family flicker like matchsticks in a typhoon, and literature hacks up dry ink like a body straining against emphysema.
Every time I come back to this book, to tweak the ebook file, to change the acknowledgments page, to pick out some pieces to post on the website, I notice something that I overlooked on a different reading. Here’s what I noticed today, from a prose poem that is a microcosm of the book in the way the whole things runs together, although you can’t tell here because I’m picking out just one line, a great one: “I wish I could dine with God On a bed of bruised plums and pumpkins so orange they make Florida jealous.”
I don’t know how many copies of this book we will sell, but I know it is a beautiful book, playful, funny, but also heart-shattering and wonderful, and I am grateful to Vi Khi Nao for sharing it with us, and as always it such an honor for me to be a part of bringing a book into the world. Thank you!
My Ardent Love for the Pencil
Vi Khi Nao
72 pages
September 6, 2025
$17
The book will be available from Bookshop, Amazon, and other retailers soon. We are also printing 200 copies, on 80-lb, white, coated stock with a matte finish, with Bookmobile, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Preorders and book club subscribers will have first priority on these first edition copies. Preorder a signed copy at malarkeybooks.com.
We are currently offering a 15% discount on all preorders with the discount code PREORDER at checkout. The code is good for the following titles:
My Ardent Love for the Pencil by Vi Khi Nao (through 9/6/25)
The Barre Incidents by Lauren Bolger (through 10/1/2025)
The Walls Are Closing In On Us by Joshua Trent Brown (publishing March 2026)
Terrestrial by Suzy Eynon (publishing May 2026)
Praise for Vi Khi Nao:
“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: 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
About the author:
Vi Khi Nao is a multidisciplinary writer working across poetry, fiction, theater, film, and collaborative art. She won the 2016 Nightboat Poetry Prize for The Old Philosopher and the 2017 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize for A Brief Alphabet of Torture. Her latest novel, The Italy Letters, was published by Melville House. A former Black Mountain Institute and the current 2024-2025 Iowa Artist fellow, she was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.