My Ardent Love for the Pencil

Author: Vi Khi Nao

Publisher: Malarkey (2025)

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.