Fish Carcass by Vi Khi Nao

Blending autobiographical truth with poetic invention, Vi Khi Nao’s Fish Carcass is a pointillist portrait that catalogs a tripartite digestion process of being-in-the-world. Opening with “Victuals,” sensuous delight cedes to the shock of larger-than-life forces that constrict the everyday in “Spasms,” where impersonal paroxysms negotiate the personal terrain of biology with a chorus of organs which sing the particular textures of their experience culminating in “Corporality.” At once polyvocal and joyous, terrified and terrifying, the poems in Fish Carcass register expression across multiple thresholds, suturing physical and metaphysical, worldly and otherworldly, human and nonhuman domains to create a cornucopia of potentialities as sprawling as life itself.

Praise for Fish Carcass

“Welcome to the world of Vi Khi Nao’s Fish Carcass. ‘A river, not yet employed by the Milky Way, steps into the body of another river— / To change the discourse of time.’ Here poems enact an explicit alchemy, are alive with the self and that-beyond-self. Both personal and impersonal, bold and morphological, her language makes links and unlinks, allows for criticality, delight, horror, and canny humor. A wonderful wild ride.”

—Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

“A furiously inventive lament spiked with wit—a tangy polyvocal plethora—a gut-clench and a soul-check, VKN’s Fish Carcass MRIs her and other creatures’ ills and pleasures. Violence, vulnerability, alienation: no yearning, devotion, touch or light—girl-on-girl, daughter-mother, quester-god—fully offsets this grief, no pop stylings, stunning images, or sexy menus let you metabolize it. Against the heartache and the 10,000 natural shocks that flesh/fish/flora’s heir to, what mode skirts the void? With Taoist, Buddhist, Gnostic, and Presocratic hints, Vi Khi Nao’s Xtreme art goes for wild acuity: ‘We all throw our children into the garbage bins because we / know they have a high tolerance for insomnia.’ This book is deep, hilarious, uncanny, haunting.”

—Moyna Pam Dick, author of I am writing you from afar

“Fish Carcass is a mastication of beauty and love. It is credulous, demanding answers to questions we haven’t begun to think of yet: Should a sapling die for love of moonlight? Is suicide and 159 hours working overtime diligent? Is it possible for lettuce to be spanked by whale oil? Vi Khi Nao’s poetry is cunning, bold, and flagrant; slicing through flank and driving into marrow.”

—Daisuke Shen

Vi Khi Nao’s work includes poetry, fiction, film, play, and cross-genre collaboration. She is the author of the novels Swimming With Dead Stars (FC2, 2022) and Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), the story collections The Vegas Dilemma (11:11 Press, 2021) and A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), and five poetry collections: A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019), Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (1913 Press, 2017), and The Old Philosopher (winner of the 2014 Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry). She was the Fall 2019 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.

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