Name: That Woman Could Be You by Vi Khi Nao + Jessica Alexander
SKU: 978-1-60964-400-0
Price: 22.00 USD
Availability: InStock

THAT WOMAN COULD BE YOU

That Woman Could Be You is an orphic documentary of the circadian, an archive of queer and quotidian rituals, an observant meditation on the ephemerality and defiance of chronic pain, desire, and grief as they manifest in daily acts. This intrinsically sapphic & feminist project does not chronicle an excursion so much as the stillness of interiority: Alexander fluctuates between belief and disbelief at the news of her brother’s death and Nao manages the fatigue and breathlessness of heart surgery. Meanwhile the Interstates carry them from Louisiana to Texas to Colorado; to work and away from it. That Woman Could Be You lends a euphoric, nostalgic, and dreamlike beauty to the everydayness of diurnal tasks. It is about moving through the world together, as women, in Nao’s case a Vietnamese woman, and the newness of their love and life together.

Like Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary seen through a fervid haze, its Super 8 frames fractaling in and out of memory’s forlorn theatrics, the pieces in this book invite the reader on a jaunt of vanishingly small, gigantic, public, and intimate dimensions. Accept the invitation. Reel with all the ways That Woman Could be You. –– ALI RAZ, author of Alien

The book, visually, looks stunning –– reminds me of The Fear of Losing Eurydice by Julieta Campos ––and the poems are so mundanely mystical that there’s no difference between the physical and the spiritual, the ‘me’ and the ‘you’. –– MARC ANTHONY RICHARDSON, American Book Award winner, and author of Year of the Rat and Messiahs

If a love story has a beginning, middle, and end, then this is a book of the middle, of the hundred middles –– of the rice, lemons, sweatpants , workdays, rented rooms –– that deep connection is made of. Danger, death, and chronic pain wait in the dark, so “we [walk] home like two lamp posts.” Familiar and strange, this wonderfully intimate, genre-bending book is a gift of trust to the reader. It’s like finding a witty, lyrical letter handwritten on the back pages of a library book you never want to return. –– BRAD AARON MODLIN, author of Everyone at this Party Has Two Names

Reading That Woman Could Be You is an overwhelming immersion in an intimate world of knowing and unknowing. The stunning work is steeped in love and grief and, most of all, in the persistent genius needed to expose them. –– IAN BEAMISH, Dr. James Wilson/BORSF Eminent Scholar Endowed Professor in Southern Studies University of Louisiana at Lafayette

What does it mean to be a woman, that Other? This book cannot tell you any more than your mother—remembered, fictitious—can. But what if every person you ever loved was Jessica Alexander who was Vi Khi Nao who was a singular writer with two heads and one heart and a thousand brains? But every person you ever loved was a verb. Grieve, thrust, probe, sear—for example. Not your mother, not remembered or fictitious, but language, in all its glory and precision and ambiguity. That is this book. And if you let it, this book will crack you open, replace your insides with ferns, shrimps, televisions: or tiny bits of the souls of two singular writers. –– JACLYN WATTERSON, author of Ventriloquisms

An unconventional masterpiece from two of the most transcendent writers working in America today. I dare you to read this collaboration and not be inspired in your own life and art.–– MICHAEL SHOU-YUNG SHUM, author of Queen of Spades

VI KHI NAO earned her B.A. in Art & Spanish from Central College and an M.F.A from Brown University. She is the author of five poetry collections: A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (Press 11:11, 2021), Human Tetris(11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). She is an interdisciplinary artist who works in multiple and interchangeable mediums. Her drawings have appeared in literary journals such as NOON and The Adirondack Review. Her video, digital, and literary installations have been exhibited at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts in Providence in Rhode Island and in the largest exhibition halls for contemporary art in Europe, Malmö Konsthall, in Sweden.Her work includes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, performance, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. https://www.vikhinao.com

JESSICA ALEXANDER earned an MA at Ohio University and her PhD at the University of Utah. Alexander’s work explores trauma and the power of violent comedy through the parodic repetition of old forms. She has given talks and taught courses on queering the thriller, the poetics of queer comedy, and hauntology. Her story collection, Dear Enemy explores the barbed though familiar form of fairytales, coupling their fatalistic simplicity—the paratactic, transition-less shift from small talk to death—with a blithe, whimsical, and often ecstatic narrative voice. Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her novella, “None of This Is an Invitation” (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press in the spring of 2023. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she serves as Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program and teaches Fiction at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. https://www.jessica-alexander.com

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