A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line

Author: Vi Khi Nao

Publisher: Eleven Eleven Press (2021)

"Once again, Vi Khi Nao models an achievement of possibilities in a bell curve is a pregnant straight line that is nothing short of a miracle for the future of the body: 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

"Imagine turning yourself—your whole body—inside-out, all the way, so that the you inside of you, i.e. every connected, reclusive, and/or unfathomable organ, cell, humor, sense, memory, affection and idea, became your new skin, profile and comportment. Then imagine looking and feeling, in that quasi-möbius and uncannily porous transposition, more like yourself than you ever felt before. Vi Khi Nao’s A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line is, for me, the transcendent, coruscating art of that sensation."

–Brandon Shimoda

"Vi Khi Nao is such a wildly singular writer, it’s always a breathless romp. I would give her the last pen in my quiver and know that she’ll jolt us right out of our shirts, our pants, our sweaty and shimmering skin."

–Sawako Nakayasu

"With formal experimentation and direct beckoning, Vi Khi Nao, draws us into this collection ripe with sound, sorrow, and sensuality. a bell curve is a pregnant straight line is a lyric calendar punctuated with playful wit and answers to questions you hadn’t even thought to ask. the queer erotic is savored here—slurped like ‘Sapphở.’ Nao builds an anthropomorphized architure, and within it we find a certain uncanny order to things. ‘But even intimate objects move.’ in a bell curve is a pregnant straight line, Nao shows us that strangeness, amplified, can midwife new clarity and light up our dark mortal corners."

–Alicia Mountain 

"The inimitable genius of Vi Khi Nao is on full display in a bell curve is a pregnant straight line. once immersed in her sensorium perception is heightened to the point of ecstatic convergence. the dramatic details are resplendent, volatile. Insight flashes like a searchlight. the poignancy of scintillation is 'an iridescent hallucinogen' in dappled lines of brilliance. Interspersed throughout are Vi’s enigmatic line drawings; the totality of this book is mesmerizing and astounding."

–Brenda Iijima