Vi Khi Nao's Book Release Reading with OF Cieri and Kat Giordano
Greetings Malarkey fans!
This is just to say—Vi Khi Nao is going to be reading from her new poetry collection, My Ardent Love for the Pencil, for the book release on Wednesday, September 3, at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. The event begins at 7 p.m. Vi will be joined by Malarkey authors OF Cieri (Backmask, 2023) and Kat Giordano (Thumbsucker, 2024).
You can get more info and RSVP at PowerhouseArena.com.
Hope you can make it!
“Vi Khi Nao is an unstoppable genius.”
—Garielle Lutz
What is it to exist in such a way that life, love, and literature are linked so tightly that no difference remains? In this tight novella-like poems, where the sentences seem to follow no order but a silky libidinal pulsation and the narrator’s beloved is literally a pencil, hybrid poet-writer-artist Vi Khi Nao tells us how—and tells us, too, of the stakes that attend such an existence especially when confronting the sharp edges of illness or systemic neglect. Friendships are ended and begun. Lovers are met and left. Family rhythms wax and wane. A beloved mentor diligently tries to school the author in the literary establishment’s worldly protocols. And literature continues through it all, an evil sun whose dark light enlivens as much as it destroys.
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.
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.