Umbilical Hospital

Umbilical Hospital Front w spineVI KHI NAO


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Imagine an entity composed of sheep, wheat, assholes, clitorises, stars. Why not? That would be this poem, this world — a perfectly recognizable post-human world which is also post surreal. Vi Khi Nao is making it new, no, she is doing the old job of making us see what’s already here in a new way. We’re already part of the bunny-frog and the sheep machine and we’re feeling fine. This is bold, fresh, necessary work.

    – Rae Armantrout


In this book—a vision of a vision—to see is to become. To count, or be counted, is to transform. Vi Khi Nao promises her readers to “split in half, to spread-eagle, to alter/the delirium of grass.” Heady, dreamy, painful and acute, the images in these poems recombine to digest, rather than describe, Leslie Thornton’s “Sheep Machine.” Certainly, one must look at the body from two very different eyes at once for it to become an umbilical hospital.

– Sophia Dahlin


vikhinaoauthphotoVi Khi Nao was born in Long Khánh, Vietnam. She is the author, most recently, story collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry.

More about Vi Khi Nao HERE!