“When I eat her bicycle, I inhale vitamin C. Especially around the rim.”
—Valance LeAbsencern
“My orifice is thirsty for architecture. I want to be inside something corporate.”
—Magnolia Istanbul
The Proscenium
Vi Khi Nao
December 2019
Vi Khi Nao’s language isn’t made of words like everyone else’s.
Joanna Ruocco
A woman uses the keys of a dismantled, antique typewriter to write a manuscript. She makes little progress and is able to generate only three letters of the manuscript. The letters are t, h, e, which is the entire word for an article. The Proscenium is a satire on production and feminism and acts as an antithetical or opposition to male’s prolixity on the canvas of literary canon.
About the Author
Vi Khi Nao is the author of a novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press), and two poetry collections: The Old Philosopher (Nightboat Books) and Umbilical Hospital (1913 Press). Vi’s work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. She was the winner of the 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest.
Praise
Praise for Previous Work
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
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
Links
Publication Details
Chapbook
Saddle-stitched. 40 pp, 5.25 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 15 2019
Distribution: Direct Only