A Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line

Vi Khi Nao

Once again, Vi Khi Nao models an achievement of possibilities in A Bell Curve is A Pregnant Straight Line that is nothing short of a miracle for the future of the body: 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, author of The Absurd Man

Imagine turning yourself—your whole body—inside-out, all the way, so that the you inside of you, i.e. every connected, reclusive, and/or unfathomable organ, cell, humor, sense, memory, affection and idea, became your new skin, profile and comportment. Then imagine looking and feeling, in that quasi-möbius and uncannily porous transposition, more like yourself than you ever felt before. Vi Khi Nao’s A Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line is, for me, the transcendent, coruscating art of that sensation.

— Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall

Vi Khi Nao is such a wildly singular writer, it’s always a breathless romp. I would give her the last pen in my quiver and know that she’ll jolt us right out of our shirts, our pants, our sweaty and shimmering skin.

— Sawako Nakayasu, author of Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From

With formal experimentation and direct beckoning, Vi Khi Nao, draws us into this collection ripe with sound, sorrow, and sensuality. A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line is a lyric calendar punctuated with playful wit and answers to questions you hadn’t even thought to ask. The queer erotic is savored here—slurped like ‘Sapphở.’ Nao builds an anthropomorphized architure, and within it we find a certain uncanny order to things. ‘But even intimate objects move.’ In A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line, Nao shows us that strangeness, amplified, can midwife new clarity and light up our dark mortal corners.

— Alicia Mountain, author of High Ground Coward

The inimitable genius of Vi Khi Nao is on full display in A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line. Once immersed in her sensorium perception is heightened to the point of ecstatic convergence. The dramatic details are resplendent, volatile. Insight flashes like a searchlight. The poignancy of scintillation is “an iridescent hallucinogen” in dappled lines of brilliance. Interspersed throughout are Vi’s enigmatic line drawings; the totality of this book is mesmerizing and astounding. 

— Brenda Iijima, Author of Animate, Inanimate Aims

Can poems be funny? I believe that Vi Khi Nao would say “yes!” I loved reading this work: it made me laugh, it made me want to write, it made me want to regard every single thing—the wood pile, a sweater, this table—as a thing alive and singing. Yes, singing because I don’t know when, since listening to Mad Villain/MF Doom, I have encountered rhymes so delicious. Another striking thing about this collection is space. How delicately placed lacunae shape the page, making us really read each word and then savor the connections between: the joy of jumping the synapse. This savoring and active connection-making matters. “Matter” like “material” and “matrix” and "mother," Bracha Ettinger reminds us, which is the weaver’s basis, the pre-modern grid where separate strands make a surface. And so this book is filled with webs and knots, crochet and cuts, shoulder pads and even skorts—a true hybrid. This is life as a big flexible bag of textile thought and utterance, a good shape for ease and difficulty, two textures that these poems and drawings make in the same time. 

— Jill Magi, author of Threads and Labor

I believe in the ferocious, carnal and vegetal humanity of Vi Khi Nao’s writing. Each new book adds to a quivering, entangled body of work and A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line is my new favorite. It’s grief-stunned, erotic, and wild. In Nao’s lines, with their veering and encompassing ways, “no lover is solid” and yet the poet’s gaze is “a potent, Sapphic one”. The title poem took my breath away, and even describes the process by which that happened: “Her tears reach into my ribs / & pull out every single breath out of my chest”. When you finish reading this blurb you should wash yourself in the coolness of its sobs: “anything that / Rhymes with the human pit.” Incredible.

— Jared Stanley, author of Book Made of Forest

Vi’s imagination oozes sex, buzzes with technology, gobbles food, and dances with goddesses, literary figures, a balloon artist, ancestors, and Sapphic ghosts. These poems grab me by the ovaries. I needed this corporeal poetry, poetry sloshing with fluids and brave bodies, at this very moment.

— Kristy Lin Billuni, content creator of THE SEXY GRAMMARIAN

In the Tree of Life that is its cover (art rendered by Sophia Trinh). In its heart given to moving forms of life by way of words working unheard hearings across audibility thresholds. In its forwarding messages’ message secreted inside the lexicon.

                                                          The woman descends

                                                          into the tent called

                                                          Black Pearl.

Vi Khi Nao’s eye-ear-tongue finds inside finding the sounds that weren’t there a minute before when we checked in on them to see if they were ok. She has sent them into other orbits, while we were distracted by what we thought we knew was this amerenglish dictionary sharing its existence with us.

— Steve Dickison, author of Inside Song

Out Now! // July 19, 2021

ABOUT

POETIC

Shorts, Shirts, Skorts, Skirts

A tragic first date. An evicted fetus. A restaurant called Sapphở. The flu. Argiope spiders. A room. The sea. Body parts as clothing. A long poem. A short one. A long one. Flipping like Morse signals, the poems in this collection gather under the pregnant arc of the bell curve in four quadrants that gestate desire. They scatter and sprawl across the page, or shrink in demure bundles, become pen-and-ink drawings, become lists, perform a termite insurrection against style.

photo credit: Scott Indermaur

ISBN: 9781948687416 (ebook)

ISBN: 9781948687409 (paperback)