My Ardent Love for the Pencil

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p>