Vi Khi Nao Libros

In a surreal exploration of faith and existence, two friends engage in a whimsical vigil alongside a man named after a vegetable and a narcoleptic goat that may embody divinity. Set in a sixth-dimensional realm governed by cartoon physics, the narrative blurs the lines between reality and fiction, as iconic playwrights Beckett and Kane intertwine. This imaginative journey challenges conventional literary norms, inviting readers into a fever dream of theology and absurdity.

The Italy Letters is a slim, powerful shot of literary fantasia from one of America's best-kept secrets. Long a cult favourite, visionary writer Vi Khi Nao weaves an unforgettable and highly distinctive story of a love affair suffused with longing, erotic passion, and heartbreak - all while painting a picture of the scabby underside of Las Vegas. This beautiful and mesmerizing novel by a queer Vietnamese American writer is a brilliant and unclassifiable work of fiction that takes the form of a series of letters written by the unnamed narrator to her lover in Italy... part of a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is by turns poignant, bawdy, funny, and disturbing - and often beautifully poetic. The story touches, obliquely but powerfully, on the immigrant experience, LGBTQIA identity, social class in the academy, writing, betrayal, sex, and homesickness. The narrator is in the process of caring for her declining mother, who is both deteriorating in health but remains imperious - not perhaps an uncommon dynamic, and one that is sketched with great compassion, humour, and yes, exasperation. The result is an authentically distinctive piece of writing from an underrated writer on the cusp.

A series of poetic remixes, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER might be considered a form of spirit possession. Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet's work--a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, Hồ Xuân Hương to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat Afreen--and alters its DNA, infusing it with an other idiolect. This is an idiolect of pleasure (the wordplay, puns, and cadence of the Vietnamese language) and of pain (the long shadow of the Vietnam war in the lives of those who survived, barely survived, and became refugees). Like any possessing spirit, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER speaks in tongues: using others' words to articulate a personal pain. Shorn of their original context and content, the poems in this collection--mutant-hybrids who retain a trace of their skeleton while dressed in entirely other clothes--become a play of voices that call into question notions of authenticity and self in poetic production, a postmodern twist for the classical craft.