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SHEEP MACHINE is a textual inscape, a poetically painted nonfictional pasture where mechanical violence and visceral fear coalesce into a kind of science prosody, a post-human panorama whose beauty lies in the ruins of reality it depicts. Influenced by Leslie Thornton’s film of sheep feeding in a field as a conveyor belt of cable cars ascend and return from a mountain in the Swiss Alps, Vi Khi Nao takes perception into tumultuous terrains, into a pastoral-celestial void in which temporality is transcended, progress is a bourgeois invention, and god is a liability for our life spent in hunger and grazing. Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine is grace said at the ontological last supper.
Preorders for Sheep Machine are now available at Small Press Distribution. A limited edition of 30 signed and numbered copies, with alternate cover design, will be for sale from Black Sun Lit at the 2018 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Tampa, FL, March 7–10, at table T1921.
Advance praise for Sheep Machine:
“The unglamorous labor of ‘logging’ footage is, like childbirth, often seen as a necessary torment best forgotten once its productive work is done . . . Vi Khi Nao empowers this deceptively objective art of time-coded naming with a wild heart, a deep ethics, and the slant-philosophical poetics that returns me continuously to her gorgeous, necessary (and frankly addictive) work.”
—Anna Moschovakis
“Vi Khi Nao’s poetic ekphrasis of Leslie Thornton’s Sheep Machine is a visceral companion to an optical theatre of ordinary and extraordinary images that rub off the burning edge of consciousness . . . This is hallucinatingly generative work.”
—Dong Li
“As Vi Khi Nao inventively and with painstaking patience transposes image to the obtuse realm of text, the gaze becomes an action we tumble into, that kaleidoscopes intricacies of vision—or in-sight—spinning away within us . . .”
—Dao Strom
“Through diligent, rich, and elegant description, Sheep Machie slides through philosophical discourse on suffering, volition, and intimacy. Vi Khi Nao’s utterly original voice penetrates the mundane with brilliant, erotic, fanciful observation grounded in perspicacious humanity . . .”
—Alison Prine
Visit the Sheep Machine page for additional product details, reviews, excerpts, and purchasing information.
Interested reviewers: Email editors [at] blacksunlit [dot] com for an advance review copy.