Sheep Machine

by Vi Khi Nao

Sheep Machine is a textual inscape, a poetically painted nonfictional pasture where mechanical violence and visceral fear coalesce into a kind of science prosody, a post-human panorama whose beauty lies in the ruins of reality it depicts. Influenced by Leslie Thornton’s film of sheep feeding in a field as a conveyor belt of cable cars ascend and return from a mountain in the Swiss Alps, Vi Khi Nao takes perception into tumultuous terrains, into a pastoral-celestial void in which temporality is transcended, progress is a bourgeois invention, and god is a liability for our life spent in hunger and grazing. Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine is grace said at the ontological last supper.

Genres: Poetry

151 pages, Paperback

Published June 27, 2018

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.
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Reviews

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'00:05

Another second into the future, one blade of wheat shifts from obscurity into fame. The future of one blade encodes impermanent immortality. To stand erect, so very near the terminal commanding the aerial passenger ropeway, is to be vulnerable and naked without anyone knowing. To stand. To stand.'

(p15)

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't say I understand all of it, but I feel like this is just genius.

Meditative, philosophical, strange, funny, beautiful, I could go on and on. The collection really picks up for me more in the middle and towards the end, but I think you need the slowness of the beginning in order to buy into the premise. The balls to write a whole book musing on the second-by-second events of a kaleidoscopic video of sheep grazing... When I was reading the back and the "praise for" section I was about to write this off as pretentious bulsh and just skim it for class, but at about forty pages in I was convinced this was something really special.


00:32
Who weeps? Two sheep and we are a small cluster of blinding, blond joy. Heads bowed; coffin on a mission. Five black hearts carrying the weight of the Sheep Machine. To aim. To fire. An ablation. A battalion. Even an automated star wears tripods to capture the heightened imagery of its asteroidic imagination.


00:39
We begin to see the neck of the sheep to the left more clearly. Amoeba-like in design, the sheep waxes the grass with quiet intent. As if to say: One day the snow will grow a beard, yellow and gold. Fruits of demon and Lucifer's paradisal den. And slow, so slow, the sheep whispers into the grass: You are so wild. The grass replies: Even on the hills my roots are trapped in the earth. Wild, so wild, but I am a balloon held down by rock. The sheep adds, "Do you know I read Bhrigupati Singh and Nietzsche?" The grass replies, "I wish I could smoke some weed while you read to me. I really wish. Man. I really do wish I could smoke some weed." The sheep responds, "I have a high tolerance for cocaine. I just do. I just do. You are going to have to take my word for it. I just do."


01:26
Breath of light holds onto light. Black laces around the necks of some sheep lead us to believe that they have been chained and trained to accept the forced eating of fares. Rituals of opportunity. How quiet the sun basks above the unexposed skulls of these seemingly friendly martyrs of mouth and sight. Is time an engine or is time a basket of hair? Meant to last and smelling awful when burnt away.

[Peter Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn, my head is so broken by this! I read it twice, through; it's a slow motion weirdness, world of wonder, sheep and machines. Such ferocious, relentless attention. It's like when someone is staring at something so long that you, along with them, get drawn in and alternately beset and bewildered.

01:32
More butt cheeks of sheep moon the
mountain. The mountain is out of
range, but not deranged.

0:33
Goosebumps, matters of the subcon-
scious, drive the front wheels of the hu-
man skin. Here, everything about the
Sheep Machine invites terror. To gaze
at the black centipedes of the rapid-fire
bow. Closer inspection of the monkey
Yodas' headdress, an empyrean I'm-
bed with soundless white dusk falling,
evading, staging the scenery of the sky.
When the wind invites the sheep to at-
tend a party of wheat, the sheep blend
with another so that two wooly bodies
become one. Wheat offers the semi-va-
cant crowd a cocktail cereal. It's a soft,
soft party.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an ekphrastic piece about a film of sheep grazing, but about the morphing transforming environment of the medium of film and the microfocus on the landscape itself. It meanders and hovers. I read it once thinking of the film and twice imagining the words on their own which take on their own independent wildly surreal creation of machines and nature, the weather and pop culture. Like vignettes in a long dream of semi-related imagery along the same theme. The tone feels exploratory and other times cutting and critical of the world, not necessarily the one it is intimately profiling, but the one art is contained in.

[Landin Chesne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nao displays impressive control of language and builds and effective ekphratic landscape. Her choices of description as she moves between discussing a video of sheep grazing and a kaleidoscoped edit of the same video are gorgeous. This book only suffers in that the second-by-second descriptions can get to be repetitive/predictable as not much happens in the video Nao is describing, but this is compensated for by Nao's philosophic tangents and recurring motifs.

Great book for a quick read.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vi Khi Nao is the only person alive who could coach Nick Kyrgios how to be the raisonneur in a 1994 Phnom Penh sidewalk coffeeshop dialogue.

This work of love teaches us how to place a blanket on the earth for uninvited intimacy. Endure your awkward feelings during its first pages and find yourself in its despiraling intensity as b-b-b--b-becoming is halted.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading about the visual morphing of sheep and wheat in camera frames for 140+ pages .. i wasn't expecting this to be so fun and fantastical