Oh God, Your Babies Are So Delicious

by Vi Khi Nao

In this first anthology of Vi Khi Nao's stories, the intelligence of cutting-edge fiction playfully twists around fruit, suburban disorders, grim butterflies, and intimate glimpses into the author's dark and fantastic imagination.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories, Fiction

149 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2014

About the author

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her forthcoming novel, The Italian Letters, is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, The Six Tones of Water with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nao received the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.
https://www.vikhinao.com


https://twitter.com/vikhinao
https://www.instagram.com/vikhinao/
https://www.facebook.com/vikhinao

Reviews

[Ksenia Anske · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absurdist tales. The best I've read in a long time. A baby peeled off its skin. Octopus nipples. A popcorn horror story of a marriage that sinks in fat. Velcro vaginas during sandstorms. An avocado having an abortion. Do I need to go on? I never dreamed that anyone could outdo Daniil Kharms, the absurdist idol of my childhood. Well, Vi Khi Nao did, and with the female eroticism and horror, for once. A delight to buy and read and reread and savor (and then abort those seed babies from avocados).

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Falling somewhere between short fiction and lyric poetry, "Oh, God, Your Babies Are So Delicious" is a remarkable exploration of language and its possibilities. Erudite, deeply erotic and equally cruel, with the airy grace of a fairy tale (that sometimes folds back on itself), Vi Khi Nao's voice is clear but constantly changing, always self-aware, and capable of pretty much anything. There are beautiful, grotesque, insightful stories; stories that are really poems; poems that are really stories.

Some highlights are "Janet and the Tub of Popcorn", "The Problem With Modern Literature," (which is only one sentence), "The Baby," and "Will You Deflect my Posture," but the quality is generally high through most of the collection. Somehow, Nao manages to write about cucumbers and abortions, incest, eating babies, and raping mothers without necessarily being a transgressive writer.

Later on I noticed the book falling into certain formal patterns. Nao seems to have a few modes she was particularly interested in exploring, and it's great to see the very different treatment of similar forms throughout the collection. This is definitely experimental writing, and probably more interesting to readers of poetry than fiction, but it all felt very fresh and alive. As a fiction writer Barthelme is probably the closest parallel, but that's not really a good comparison either.

The collection felt a little long, but there's a lot here. I read through most of it at four in the morning in one sitting, which is something I haven't done in a while--especially since I'm a novel person and it's rare for me to read collections at all. This is a challenging book but also a rewarding one, and definitely one I'd recommend checking out.

[Peter Tieryas]

Prepare to be devoured by Vi Khi Nao’s prose. Her words are a hypnotizing mix of melancholy and visceral repulsion at the urbanity of every day existence that also, strangely, feels joyous. Whether it’s an avocado about to have an abortion, or a reduction architect who is erasing his own body, there’s an imaginative horror that vivifies, and in some case, mummifies the uncanny.

Full review at Entropy:

http://entropymag.org/oh-god-your-bab...

[Richard Lamon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all the best tales of transformation – physical, verbal, intimately corporeal – the poems and stories in this collection leave the reader with a heightened awareness of the myriad possibilities of the phenomena in which we find ourselves, and of which we are joyfully, painfully, a part.



I mean I don’t know if it’s something that you are conscious of. I mean I don’t like to think in terms of derivatives, authors whom which you may have taken or influences, but it does feel like Gertrude Stein. Declarative. Simple sentences. You also may make allude to other writers: Sebald. You have a quote from Sebald. Anne Carson. “Anne Cardaughter”. The “Three Hours” talks a lot about doorframe, which makes me think of Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. I don’t know if that’s something you thought of, but the idea of this kind of sentence or the way in which sentences, I think, …Grammar is about time. Tenses. Just the very act of reading. The way in which words are sequential. And sentences being units with periods, begins and ends, are very much indebted to an embedded inner sense of time and time does figure prominently than you think, thus the transformation, the way in which words can transform into other things. There is a lot of punning. You have a very heightened sense of language. You sort of pun, witty puns, and I can easily find any of them. They are throughout the whole book. You have these kinds of words that are transforming. Kind of similar, but obviously very different in meaning. You are sort of forcing them to sound like other words. And then there is that other kind of transformation. Quite often about the body. You certainly do a lot with that. That obese woman eating herself almost to death while her husband helplessly looks on. The man who believes he is losing parts of his body because his child is borne and he thinks there is some kind of finite way in which the child gains a limb and he has to lose one. Obviously memories. I mean, I suppose, you could say that it is true of most narrative, but I do find that there is a real heightened sense in these poems. One of the nice things about them is that it leaves you, it left me with this heightened sense of the body. Of the way, of the transformation. Of even the kind of grungy stuff, you know, excrement, and all of that. All of the ugliest things too that have that are a part of this canopy. This is the sense I get from it. I just love that these poems, a lot of these poems, are stuffed with life. I mean: “The False Morels” is fun. Again, it’s a pun on morals or morels. Morel being a fungus. Again, you are back to that; something that is parasitical on another body. What else. “On Flesh”…oh, yes, that’s the one about the mother. I like that. A lot. The one about the abused woman. I didn’t respond well to that. It seems to me, kind of like, okay. It didn’t have that. I know you were trying to narrate a particular place, a certain kind of life. You captured that, but I just think that in terms of the richness of it, of the reading, I found that some of these others. “Eugene’s Walker” was good. What else do I like? “The Kiss.” “The Kiss” made me think of Proust. Proust is always fretting about whether his mother is going to kiss him goodnight, but in this – yeah, in the first volume of Proust, but in this - it’s about a child’s awareness of the mother and father are no longer affectionate. And what else do we have here: “The Baby.” “The Baby” of course. “Hermaphrodite in Iowa.” “Red Light Green Light” which is a kind of, or assumed as a vaguely incestuous happening or the possibility of something happening. I also like “The Washing Dishes.” “Washing Dishes” makes me think of something like Kafka. This sort of fable of someone who works at a lame kind of job. It’s written in this very official sounding language, which makes me think of the kind of language in which the students whose essays you are grading in which you have written in, it’s almost. It’s very noticeably elaborate and ornamental and obscure sense of vocabulary. What is nice about this collection is I just use that transformation thing which is a kind of rubric…I shouldn’t use the word “rubric”, but an umbrella term. What I did like about is the variety: you do have a lot of stuff. A lot of changes in voice. It’s never dull and it’s never monotonous. It’s always shifting and lots of surprises. Flashes of intimacy. You know you get into some really potentially painful kind of stuff, but it’s never…it’s always compelled…it’s sort of like eating chocolate. They are all different. That’s what I think.



It’s not a question of improvement. Some pieces appeal to me better than others. The heavy lady who is eating popcorn. It didn’t work for me. It didn’t take me anywhere particularly, I guess. It didn’t have a pithiness or the density of some of the other stuff. But that’s just me. As far as improvement, I might be interested. I am sorry: Are you Vietnamese? This is an awkward thing to say because I don’t want to suggest that you become an ethnic writer or you talking about you being Vietnamese, but it is sort of interesting to think about. You do that one with the story about the mother. Allusions here and there. Vietnamese words and so forth. You might explore that a little. Maybe you do that in other books. I think that would be kind of interesting. I was intrigued by that. And maybe some of the memories you had of that time of your life. And your relationship to that culture. But then again, I don’t know if it’s a place you want to go. I am speaking as an outsider. For me, it’s interesting.



This one about the handsome man. I don’t know. That again made me think. That also has that kind of deliberate flatness. I think about the fat woman story. He keeps on reiterating that he is a handsome man and I think of handsome as a pun as something to do with hands, but also... that’s a bit more of a miracle..a little more fanciful than the lady who is eating popcorn. But I am trying to think. The one about the man who thinks his child is taking parts from him. Then it’s just become about the mechanical thing. Why is the man be with the lawnmower? Why did he have it? Sometimes in work like this. Sometimes they have dream logic or internal logic. Organic unity on certain level. People might be curious why you chose that. I think you have to make it more apparent to the reader. That’s all I could think of. I read it once. I mean I read a couple of pieces a couple of time. But I have to read it again and maybe in context with your other work.



I like “Monique’s Face.” “The False Morels.” “On Flesh.” This I like this a lot. I forgot about this one: “When You Let Your Hair Down, Christine.” That’s really nice. It’s very poignant. It has an actual sharpness and poignant that the others don’t have so much. I like that. But that – I am not saying that the other should have that but I was struck by its poignant of that particular one. So. It’s all too often that one of the criticisms of contemporary writing is that it seems to like be afraid of emotions or beauty that it seems like of like courageous poem and the intimacy of that. “Hermaphrodite in Iowa.” That one was interesting.



So, yeah, I would read the other ones. All of which are available on Lulu.



Prose poems. That a genre that I haven’t investigated a lot. Prose poems. My tendency is to want to read these as poems. As prose poems. But I am not really sure if that makes any sense because I didn’t really have a sense of what a prose poem is. I guess I just want to see them as prose poems. Maybe because. I guess probably you know why, a natural reflex. Experimental fiction tends cognitively to read as poetry for a lot of people.



I am not particularly drawn to the accessible. Actually I am fascinated by the very notion of accessibility. I have always wondered about that. It’s always a word people use in reference to art. I hear people say this all the time. Even with music, which really fascinates me. What does it mean to have an accessible piece of music? I hear people say: I would not go to a concert or listen to music of John Cage or I don’t know or some postmodern or modernist composer. His work is not accessible. I have absolutely no idea. I kind of know what they are saying, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think they are trying to say…When people find something inaccessible what they’re really saying (it’s not a word they might use)…what is really being said in that word is: this does not conform to my preconception of what something should be. Though if I were to listen to a piece of music that is completely dissonance or it seems to be a compilation of random sounds like John Cage or people like that then it doesn’t fit into this mold that I have created or abided from a culture…that is what I mean when I say that inaccessible. For an example, looking at a problem and saying that or if you never have seen something before it throws off your cognitive apparatus. You want to assimilate things into what we already know because it is easier. The mind is lazy and that’s how we make our way through the world. We have to do a bit of that. But if you find something like a problem you have not seen before you want to analogize to something else, makes it easier to solve. Like with anything. The same with music and art. You look at a painting, nonrepresentational. I am going to say well, what is that supposed to mean? Or the circle of philistine or someone who doesn’t know anything about art wants to say: what is that supposed to mean? What is that supposed to mean? Of course, the answer is that: it’s supposed to be anything. You know. Whose is supposing? What does that even mean? There is need to want to get it. What you really want to do in something like this, but not really to get it, but to give yourself over to it. That’s a much better experience. You try to master it..what the human mind wants to do. At least this culture wants to do: to master it, to get it, oh, look at that, I figure it out, but it’s not, you don’t want to get it, you are not supposed to, you don’t want to get it, you want to let it happen, with that confrontation. I went to the Whitney Biennial. You know what the Whitney Biennial is? Art. Exhibit of contemporary artist that occurs every two years in New York. I went on Saturday. It was interesting. Again, it was uneven. Something was interesting and others not. I was pleased to see people doing painting. Abstract expressionism is making a kind of comeback. But next to these paintings, next to every work in that exhibit, was this text. Something like this: explaining where this person gets his or her idea, what does this mean, what is this about, what he is trying to do. Now, I am a person who has to, I am a victim of this: I am like, I’ve got to read that. I don’t want to leave anything ignored. I want to read everything. But you know what: I wish they didn’t do that. I wish they didn’t do that because it conditions you. It conditions you to look at the object. You don’t want that. You know. The best thing to do is to look at the thing first, but then you know…you have the answer to the puzzle and you want to read that. I want to get it. But there is no getting. You want to give yourself to it. It’s that confrontation between you and the book. You and the music. You and the object.

[Richard Lamon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all the best tales of transformation – physical, verbal, intimately corporeal –

the poems and stories in this collection leave the reader with a heightened awareness of the myriad possibilities of the phenomena in which we find ourselves, and of which we are joyfully, painfully, a part.



I mean I don’t know if it’s something that you are conscious of. I mean I don’t like to think in terms of derivatives, authors whom which you may have taken or influences, but it does feel like Gertrude Stein. Declarative. Simple sentences. You also may make allude to other writers: Sebald. You have a quote from Sebald. Anne Carson. “Anne Cardaughter”. The “Three Hours” talks a lot about doorframe, which makes me think of Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. I don’t know if that’s something you thought of, but the idea of this kind of sentence or the way in which sentences, I think, …Grammar is about time. Tenses. Just the very act of reading. The way in which words are sequential. And sentences being units with periods, begins and ends, are very much indebted to an embedded inner sense of time and time does figure prominently than you think, thus the transformation, the way in which words can transform into other things. There is a lot of punning. You have a very heightened sense of language. You sort of pun, witty puns, and I can easily find any of them. They are throughout the whole book. You have these kinds of words that are transforming. Kind of similar, but obviously very different in meaning. You are sort of forcing them to sound like other words. And then there is that other kind of transformation. Quite often about the body. You certainly do a lot with that. That obese woman eating herself almost to death while her husband helplessly looks on. The man who believes he is losing parts of his body because his child is borne and he thinks there is some kind of finite way in which the child gains a limb and he has to lose one. Obviously memories. I mean, I suppose, you could say that it is true of most narrative, but I do find that there is a real heightened sense in these poems. One of the nice things about them is that it leaves you, it left me with this heightened sense of the body. Of the way, of the transformation. Of even the kind of grungy stuff, you know, excrement, and all of that. All of the ugliest things too that have that are a part of this canopy. This is the sense I get from it. I just love that these poems, a lot of these poems, are stuffed with life. I mean: “The False Morels” is fun. Again, it’s a pun on morals or morels. Morel being a fungus. Again, you are back to that; something that is parasitical on another body. What else. “On Flesh”…oh, yes, that’s the one about the mother. I like that. A lot. The one about the abused woman. I didn’t respond well to that. It seems to me, kind of like, okay. It didn’t have that. I know you were trying to narrate a particular place, a certain kind of life. You captured that, but I just think that in terms of the richness of it, of the reading, I found that some of these others. “Eugene’s Walker” was good. What else do I like? “The Kiss.” “The Kiss” made me think of Proust. Proust is always fretting about whether his mother is going to kiss him goodnight, but in this – yeah, in the first volume of Proust, but in this - it’s about a child’s awareness of the mother and father are no longer affectionate. And what else do we have here: “The Baby.” “The Baby” of course. “Hermaphrodite in Iowa.” “Red Light Green Light” which is a kind of, or assumed as a vaguely incestuous happening or the possibility of something happening. I also like “The Washing Dishes.” “Washing Dishes” makes me think of something like Kafka. This sort of fable of someone who works at a lame kind of job. It’s written in this very official sounding language, which makes me think of the kind of language in which the students whose essays you are grading in which you have written in, it’s almost. It’s very noticeably elaborate and ornamental and obscure sense of vocabulary. What is nice about this collection is I just use that transformation thing which is a kind of rubric…I shouldn’t use the word “rubric”, but an umbrella term. What I did like about is the variety: you do have a lot of stuff. A lot of changes in voice. It’s never dull and it’s never monotonous. It’s always shifting and lots of surprises. Flashes of intimacy. You know you get into some really potentially painful kind of stuff, but it’s never…it’s always compelled…it’s sort of like eating chocolate. They are all different. That’s what I think.



It’s not a question of improvement. Some pieces appeal to me better than others. The heavy lady who is eating popcorn. It didn’t work for me. It didn’t take me anywhere particularly, I guess. It didn’t have a pithiness or the density of some of the other stuff. But that’s just me. As far as improvement, I might be interested. I am sorry: Are you Vietnamese? This is an awkward thing to say because I don’t want to suggest that you become an ethnic writer or you talking about you being Vietnamese, but it is sort of interesting to think about. You do that one with the story about the mother. Allusions here and there. Vietnamese words and so forth. You might explore that a little. Maybe you do that in other books. I think that would be kind of interesting. I was intrigued by that. And maybe some of the memories you had of that time of your life. And your relationship to that culture. But then again, I don’t know if it’s a place you want to go. I am speaking as an outsider. For me, it’s interesting.



This one about the handsome man. I don’t know. That again made me think. That also has that kind of deliberate flatness. I think about the fat woman story. He keeps on reiterating that he is a handsome man and I think of handsome as a pun as something to do with hands, but also... that’s a bit more of a miracle..a little more fanciful than the lady who is eating popcorn. But I am trying to think. The one about the man who thinks his child is taking parts from him. Then it’s just become about the mechanical thing. Why is the man be with the lawnmower? Why did he have it? Sometimes in work like this. Sometimes they have dream logic or internal logic. Organic unity on certain level. People might be curious why you chose that. I think you have to make it more apparent to the reader. That’s all I could think of. I read it once. I mean I read a couple of pieces a couple of time. But I have to read it again and maybe in context with your other work.



I like “Monique’s Face.” “The False Morels.” “On Flesh.” This I like this a lot. I forgot about this one: “When You Let Your Hair Down, Christine.” That’s really nice. It’s very poignant. It has an actual sharpness and poignant that the others don’t have so much. I like that. But that – I am not saying that the other should have that but I was struck by its poignant of that particular one. So. It’s all too often that one of the criticisms of contemporary writing is that it seems to like be afraid of emotions or beauty that it seems like of like courageous poem and the intimacy of that. “Hermaphrodite in Iowa.” That one was interesting.



So, yeah, I would read the other ones. All of which are available on Lulu.



Prose poems. That a genre that I haven’t investigated a lot. Prose poems. My tendency is to want to read these as poems. As prose poems. But I am not really sure if that makes any sense because I didn’t really have a sense of what a prose poem is. I guess I just want to see them as prose poems. Maybe because. I guess probably you know why, a natural reflect. Experimental fiction tends to cognitively as poetry for a lot of people.



I am not particularly drawn to the accessible. Actually I am fascinated by the very notion of accessibility. I have always wondered about that. It’s always a word people use in reference to art. I hear people say this all the time. Even with music, which really fascinates me. What does it mean to have an accessible piece of music? I hear people say: I would not go to a concert or listen to music of John Cage or I don’t know or some postmodern or modernist composer. His work is not accessible. I have absolutely no idea. I kind of know what they are saying, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think they are trying to say…When people find something inaccessible what they’re really saying (it’s not a word they might use)…what is really being said in that word is: this does not conform to my preconception of what something should be. Though if I were to listen to a piece of music that is completely dissonance or it seems to be a compilation of random sounds like John Cage or people like that then it doesn’t fit into this mold that I have created or abided from a culture…that is what I mean when I say that inaccessible. For an example, looking at a problem and saying that or if you never have seen something before it throws off your cognitive apparatus. You want to assimilate things into what we already know because it is easier. The mind is lazy and that’s how we make our way through the world. We have to do a bit of that. But if you find something like a problem you have not seen before you want to analogize to something else, makes it easier to solve. Like with anything. The same with music and art. You look at a painting, nonrepresentational. I am going to say well, what is that supposed to mean? Or the circle of philistine or someone who doesn’t know anything about art wants to say: what is that supposed to mean? What is that supposed to mean? Of course, the answer is that: it’s supposed to be anything. You know. Whose is supposing? What does that even mean? There is need to want to get it. What you really want to do in something like this, but not really to get it, but to give yourself over to it. That’s a much better experience. You try to master it..what the human mind wants to do. At least this culture wants to do: to master it, to get it, oh, look at that, I figure it out, but it’s not, you don’t want to get it, you are not supposed to, you don’t want to get it, you want to let it happen, with that confrontation. I went to the Whitney Biennial. You know what the Whitney Biennial is? Art. Exhibit of contemporary artist that occurs every two years in New York. I went on Saturday. It was interesting. Again, it was uneven. Something was interesting and others not. I was pleased to see people doing painting. Abstract expressionism is making a kind of comeback. But next to these paintings, next to every work in that exhibit, was this text. Something like this: explaining where this person gets his or her idea, what does this mean, what is this about, what he is trying to do. Now, I am a person who has to, I am a victim of this: I am like, I’ve got to read that. I don’t want to leave anything ignored. I want to read everything. But you know what: I wish they didn’t do that. I wish they didn’t do that because it conditions you. It conditions you to look at the object. You don’t want that. You know. The best thing to do is to look at the thing first, but then you know…you have the answer to the puzzle and you want to read that. I want to get it. But there is no getting. You want to give yourself to it. It’s that confrontation between you and the book. You and the music. You and the object.

[Haley Luckenbill · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 some stories were super impactful and others were just confusing .

[Michael Reeves · Rating 5 out of 5]

By Michael A.Reeves
Mar 11, 2014
Oh God, Your Babies Are So Delicious requires a certain immersion and cerebral imagination of the reader to be able to absorb its complexities. A poetic anthology that integrates the painful realities of a dysfunctional society into a series of short stories. The imagination and creativity of this book left me craving for more. To be able to seamlessly blend poetic anecdotes with quality literary fiction seems to come effortlessly to the author, Vi Khi Nao. This book is a must read for those that have a lust for transcendent stories that provoke an imagery of erotic yet disturbing stories, but also has interlaced moments of beauty and a mysterious insightfulness into somewhat taboo thoughts and experiences. I am waiting with great anticipation for the next anthology from this emerging and wonderfully accomplished author.

[Michael Reeves · Rating 5 out of 5]

By Michael A.Reeves Mar 15, 2014
Oh God, Your Babies Are So Delicious requires a certain immersion and cerebral imagination of the reader to be able to absorb its complexities. A poetic anthology that integrates the painful realities of a dysfunctional society into a series of short stories. The imagination and creativity of this book left me craving for more. To be able to seamlessly blend poetic anecdotes with quality literary fiction seems to come effortlessly to the author, Vi Khi Nao. This book is a must read for those that have a lust for transcendent stories that provoke an imagery of erotic yet disturbing stories, but also has interlaced moments of beauty and a mysterious insightfulness into somewhat taboo thoughts and experiences. I am waiting with great anticipation for the next anthology from this emerging and wonderfully accomplished author.