Description
While collecting the scattered stories of his parents' entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.
VHS reminds us, in its narrative's insistence on mediation, that the slippage between speaker and listener, experience and memory, is also a fault line that can reveal our own prior movements.
- Book tour on the East Coast Book readings in New York City
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About the Author
Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. He is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Latin American Literature Today and Best American Essays. His work on regimes of surveillance, queer migration, and the auto-archival practices of people moving across transnational spaces has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary work and a Mellon Foundation fellowship. Chris's multimedia art has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art and the film adaptation of his poem "This body's long & I'm still loading" was in the official selection at the Canadian International Film Festival.
Reviews
Praise for VHS
"Campanioni writes with the zeal of John the Evangelist, fueled by a conviction for the Word as the fleshy wet nurse of our modern reality and consciousness in exile. The peripatetic narrator of this dazzling novel, an American offspring of geopolitical exiles, has taken the trauma of his parents' geographic dislocation and subsumed it into his linguistic and spiritual DNA, into the pith of his narrative bones. VHS takes the now-staid modes of much autofiction, turns them inside out, shocks them with a thousand volts of the Proustian instability of the self, and transmutes them into something memorable, incantatory, and wholly original and alive. A bravura performance with a voyeuristic glee that is as much turned inward as it strives to transfigure moments lost in time with the Word." -Ernesto Mestre-Reed, author of Sacrificio
"How can one retrace erased steps to forgotten places? Early in his genre-and-time-bending book VHS, Chris Campanioni writes 'There are things not meant to be seen, not meant to be sorted or sorted out,' and then proceeds with searing curiosity to do just that. The framing of the past and the limits of language and stories to capture the churn of life haunt these pages. The blur of fantasy and fact--history--is parsed and pieced together again through intimate reflections on memory, heritage, and migration in this brilliant lyrical and philosophical adventure. A novel as a screen capture, a guidebook, a reimagination, a reenactment. It's an act of love to want to understand one's past, and like all love a mystery. VHS gives me everything I want. All those lightning connections of a brain running hot. The mix of tenderness and depth. Jesus. I am so excited for this book to be out in the world." -Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book
Previous Praise for Chris Campanioni
"Self-analysis is part of every memoir, but in Campanioni's case it acquires an added interest, given the apparent contrast between his roles as writer and model. The result is fascinating." -Gabriel Garcia Ochoa, Harvard Review
"In poetry and fiction, in critical essays and new-media hybrid pieces, in sentences alternately lavish and trim, he breaks the sound barrier. Like Jose Lezama Lima, Campanioni finds no syntactic or figurative posture too baroque to try on for size. Migratory poetics is among his current subjects; his protean energies-his willingness to go everywhere with a thought, and to spin an association out to its most eerie and electrified edge-elevate him to a rare rank of writer. Campanioni is the traveler who, like Herve Guibert, rides language without ever stopping to worry that language might not cooperate." -Wayne Koestenbaum, BOMB
"Campanioni shows himself to be a major intellectual force-an analyst and critic of the human condition in the midst of technological forces-their causes and consequences, costs and benefits." -Clara B. Jones, Fence
Book Information
ISBN 9781960988386
Author Chris Campanioni
Format Paperback
Page Count 278
Imprint Clash Books
Publisher Clash Books
