Blending autobiographical truth with poetic invention, Vi Khi Nao’s Fish Carcass is a pointillist portrait that catalogs a tripartite digestion process of being-in-the-world. Opening with “Victuals,” sensuous delight cedes to the shock of larger-than-life forces that constrict the everyday in “Spasms,” where impersonal paroxysms negotiate the personal terrain of biology with a chorus of organs which sing the particular textures of their experience culminating in “Corporality.” At once polyvocal and joyous, terrified and terrifying, the poems in Fish Carcass register expression across multiple thresholds, suturing physical, metaphysical, worldly, otherworldly, human, and nonhuman domains to create a cornucopia of potentialities as sprawling as life itself.
