My Ardent Love for the Pencil moves like a sloth in silk: slowly, precisely, gorgeously.

What is it to exist in such a way that life, love, and literature are linked so tightly that no difference remains? In this tight novella-like poems, where the sentences seem to follow no order but a silky libidinal pulsation and the narrator’s beloved is literally a pencil, hybrid poet-writer-artist Vi Khi Nao tells us how—and tells us, too, of the stakes that attend such an existence especially when confronting the sharp edges of illness or systemic neglect. Friendships are ended and begun. Lovers are met and left. Family rhythms wax and wane. A beloved mentor diligently tries to school the author in the literary establishment’s worldly protocols. And literature continues through it all, an evil sun whose dark light enlivens as much as it destroys.

Vi Khi Nao’s silky, liminal, novella-like poems dissolve the boundaries between photography, love, and literature, merging them into a single, pulsing reality—where a pencil is a lover, friendships and family flicker like matchsticks in a typhoon, and literature hacks up dry ink like a body straining against emphysema. “We are no longer used to the heart’s engine revving with such quiet, lonely, insistent, anatomical intensity. Not so many people have traveled in Vi Khi Nao’s language mind before. Here is your ticket, a vagrant fragrance.” — C.D. Wright

"Once again, Vi Khi Nao models an achievement of possibilities: 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

Format: Paperback

Author: Nao, Vi Khi

Publisher: Malarkey

Pub Date: September 6, 2025

Category: Poetry

ISBN: 9798990324060

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