Human Tetris
Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz

PRAISE FOR HUMAN TETRIS

“These poems are clever meals, feeding us the jumpy truth about our inner longings.”– Raluca Albu, Bomb Magazine

“Tender word orgy, prickly song, mesmerizing game, thrilling voice of multiples.” – Nathaniel Popkin, Cleaver Magazine

“Human Tetris catalogues kinks into an abundance so normal that poetry wins as ultimate release valve.” –  Ariel Goldberg, Author of The Estrangement Principle         

“Human Tetris is as complex as anything either writer has accomplished and impossibly more so” –  Grant Maierhofer, Author of Peripatet and Drain Songs

“Human Tetris is a building lattice of interlocking online identities, exposing themselves at all times yet still coming off as detached by sheer geography, sheer facelessness, sheer screenname anonymity.” – Dylan Krieger, Author of Giving Godhead and The Mother Wart

“These poems are an earnest reminder of how extravagantly weird any honest self-portrait should be” – Carrie Lorig, Author of The Pulp vs. The Throne

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Advance Praise for Human Tetris

These poems are clever meals, feeding us the jumpy truth about our inner longings. Devilish reminders that love is often just a combination of peculiar proclivities—reassurances that desire is always particular and unflinchingly weird.

Raluca Albu, Bomb Magazine

Me: Middle-aged writer, mind-softened by early summer heat, weary of humankind.

You: Tender word orgy, prickly song, mesmerizing game, thrilling voice of multiples.

Nathaniel Popkin, Cleaver Magazine

In Vi Khi Nao & Ali Raz vertically-integrated collaborative text, all subjectivity is a game of Human Tetris.

Louis Armand, Director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory,

Charles University, Prague

What is Human Tetris by Vi Khi Nao and Ali Raz? A series of poems starring supreme anti-beings? Ultra-compressed and data-moshed versions of a(n) supposed ancient-Future? A sideways ethnographics of 21st century computer-simulated un-realities? Or, is it simply a self-eating parasite that could only exist in a digital Vantablack-tinged Dark Ages of the soon-to-be artifact’d meta-apocalypse? Maybe it is all of the above? Just know, with this text, Nao and Raz have perfectly encapsulated what it means, on the Kardashev scale, to (still) be a Type 0 Civilisation. Please shelve under: forward-thinking, outré, books where the Internet is pro(?)/antagonist and absolutely (like, I’m-still-fucking-shook) terrifying.

Mike Kleine, Author of Kanley Stubrick and Lonely Men Club

Flirting with the absurdity of dating through digital devices culled from analogue word counts of print personals, Human Tetris catalogues kinks into an abundance so normal that poetry wins as ultimate release valve.

Ariel Goldberg, Author of The Estrangement Principle             

ME: wondering how two people can connect over off-kilter internet banter.

HUMAN TETRIS: Proving anything can happen if you just click send.

You might have to turn it, but this piece will fit in your life.

Chris Margolin, The Poetry Question

Human Tetris is as complex as anything either writer has accomplished and impossibly more so for their successful layering here. It’s a wild book, a fun book, and an informative book on the state of our blurred selves in the modern world.

Grant Maierhofer, Author of Peripatet and Drain Songs

Human Tetris is a building lattice of interlocking online identities, exposing themselves at all times yet still coming off as detached by sheer geography, sheer facelessness, sheer screenname anonymity. Like the curated spaces we lurk on the internet, it is as tongue-in-cheek as it is terrifyingly sincere, and you won't be able to look away. Get ready for a new scale of globalized game impossible to sit right in. This book doesn't offer playing rules, but little breadcrumbs to a final triumph forever out of reach--like a photo log of a star long dead, or a defunct message board about a movie that never reached release. All our forgotten diaries are still out there. Human Tetris imagines them stacking all the way up and filling the future with want.

Dylan Krieger, Author of Giving Godhead and The Mother Wart

“Love is a transaction and I’m applying for a job. I’m applying to / your opening.” These poems are an earnest reminder of how extravagantly weird any honest self-portrait should be / weirder still when the ideal audience of that self-portrait is meant to be a fantasy / a soul-mate / or simply an opportunity crackling flashing the other end / of the dating app / of the text. What is it to be seen / to be viewed / devoured / loved? What a peep into the center of the flower / what a delight.

Carrie Lorig, Author of The Pulp vs. The Throne

ISBN: 978-1-948687-09-6 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-1-948687-08-9 (paperback)