Fish in Exile

The result is a novel that forges a new vocabulary for the routine of grief, as well as the process of healing. --Publishers Weekly, starred review ... [Fish in Exile] highlights the patriarchy's utter inability to fully understand or appreciate motherhood, the biological imperatives that form the foundation of parenthood, and the acceptance of the notion that grief can never really be extinguished, only embraced as part of the human experience. --Angel City Review The impressions that last, however, will be entirely Nao's own: all the wondrous forms she has revealed to us, the image of them luminescent, flourishing, in the seemingly dark and empty waters of grief. --The Harvard Crimson This journey across the boundaries of form and genre, to write about what is un-write-aboutable, is a smart maneuver -- it permits the reader to experience what has been written about over and over in a way that is fresh and absorbing in its difference. --NPR Vi Khi Nao has created a meditation that splits open the numbing and disorienting problems of loss and mourning with language that breathes new life into an old suffering. --The Millions Nao, who was born in Vietnam, blends prose and poetry in her heart-wrenching novel about a couple grieving for their two dead children. --BBC ...Vi Khi Nao seems the elusive love child of Anne Carson and Samuel Beckett, a preposterous connection that, somehow, in the end, makes a lot of sense. --Star Tribune An off-kilter but effective tone poem on loss and recovery. --Kirkus Fish in Exile is a stunning novel that examines how easily we can fall apart after a disaster... Indeed, the traditional narrative of loss disappears in the capable hands of Vi Khi Nao and we are left with a powerful and devastating story that is surprising in the best ways. --diaCRITICS A staggering tale of the death of a child, this novel is a poetic meditation on loss, the fluidity of boundaries, and feeling like a fish out of water. --The Millions Fish in Exile melts traditional academic narrative with magic and folklore, creating an unforgettable story that reminds the reader there is no universally correct approach to dealing with grief. --The Rumpus A magical and fresh perspective on grief, this beautiful book is like nothing you've ever read before. --Bustle It's an extreme feat of economy and vision that Vi Khi Nao was able to so robustly depict the aftermath of the death of one's child in such a fascinating and exciting set of sentences and logic as she has in Fish in Exile. --Vice Through mythic tangents and arrest, Nao pulls us through dismemberment, dissociation, and devotion with colossal sentences. --The Fanzine The language ranges from frank gallows humor to unexpectedly devastating, as if you're at a party exchanging sarcastic witticisms with a stranger and then she suddenly hits you over the head with a brick... --The Rejectionist [F]or all the weightiness of its subject matter, Fish in Exile is also surprisingly light on its feet: eccentric, absurd, and delightfully wry. This book wriggles with so much originality and life, it'll have you hooked from the very start. --BuzzFeed Books Newsletter Occupying a myriad of spaces and spanning genres and mediums, Nao's work is a multi-faceted examination of the intersecting spaces of the religious, the corporeal, the industrial, and the pastoral. --Stutzwrites Smartly innovative, lushly poetic, compellingly told, and truly moving, Fish in Exile is a remarkable, sui generis novel. Vi Khi Nao is a strikingly talented writer whose artistic vision takes many literary forms. I ardently hope she does more long form fiction; she does it splendidly. --Robert Olen Butler In this jagged and unforgettable work, Vi Khi Nao takes on a domestic story of losing one's children and elevates it to Greek tragedy. Refusing sentimentality and realism, she shows how personal devastation can feel, to the sufferer, as powerful and enduring as myth. --Viet Thanh Nguyen Vi Khi Nao's language isn't made of words like everyone else's. This can't be true, so it must be that Vi Khi Nao has found a way to sensitize words into a phase change, into a state of semantic overflow. Nao's sentences proceed via floral, clitoral, littoral surges. Fish in Exile is what leaks from the forms literary grief has taken, and what floats away, an amalgam of jellyfish and clouds. I love this book for its texture, its granular absurdities, its aqueous erotics, its garlic paper longing. I've never felt anything like it. --Joanna Ruocco Vi Khi Nao's Fish in Exile resonates with the unconscious fecundity of myth. A modern allegory of children who give birth to their mother, minnows that push a whale's shopping cart around Walmart, and hospitals that exude an odor of insane asylums and Windex: Demeter, Callisto, Catholic, and Ethos live again in Nao's world, and make new the most fundamental contradictions of life--separation, desire, bondage, freedom, loyalty, birth. --Steve Tomasula