A Genesis in More Ways Than One: A Review of Mechanophilia by Vi Khi Nao & Sarah Burgoyne

[Mechanophilia: Book 1] is a useful direction toward reverse
and inverse time-bending (90),
[a] shimmering, hallucinatory song (18)
[that] injects the surfacing earth with slow muscled life (22).
[This book] wasn't thinking of your metaphorical well-being (85);
it [is] an inevitable act for the ‘common good’ (84).

[The authors] don't blame you for wanting to (48)
soak [their] indecipherable message (16);
[i]t makes it easier to sink (69)
like keys
discarded on the piano fringe
beside the music and wasted stems (24).
[They] expound (38)
John Cage's 4'33'' in less
than one minute (60).
[This] resilient melody of sapphire (20)
run[s] delicate and sweet (64),
as [do] [their] sentences (65).

Forgive me
for (68)
[my] close reading of (67)
[the] restless pianoforte’s hermaphroditic disposition (18),
an adamant response to the (65)
loquacious concubine vajazzling the primitive child of my ego (33)
—[t]he one who exfoliates my libido without taking (33)
my membership with loneliness (9).
I would not have been (87)
mendicant, divine (75)
but you know that I am fluent (75)
[in] devastating isotopes of emotional indifference (9).
[M]etre by metre (53)
I love the taste (44)
against (12)
[M]y ache to exist (99),
[e]ach vertebra a fruit
I bury into the earth of my charred mouth (24)

[Reader], don’t you wish (82)
to take signs for wonders (103)?
[The authors] have wanted to ask (15):
[W]ould you rupture attention
by falling into the bellybutton of a snowflake (15)?
[W]ill you remain (14)
worthy of [their] lexical persuasions (29)?
If you were [their] therapist, [reader], what (70)
might (61)
your small and perfect mouth (40)
mewl (107)?
[Reader], isn’t it time for (68)
the word struck like lightning in [your] capillaries (13)?
[W]entletrap
wentletrap
wentletrap (40).

I take this [book] as a prophetic sign of (46)
mnemonic magnesium (53).
[T]ulip hearts of dolphins (47)
[d]enote
a holy virtue (66).
God's scribbled notes (27)
[d]enote (53)
prejudice (73).
[The authors’] barbed admonitions (33)
reveal a monologue (24)
as if it (19)
is precisely the feasibility of howling (22)
[b]uried
in (23)
[their] vocal cords (20).

Mechanophilia: Book 1 is the first of four volumes comprising this collaborative epic by Vi Khi Nao and Sarah Burgoyne, who have (still) never met in person. This volume corresponds to the first three thousand places in the decimal representation of pi, where each line’s length is determined by its corresponding decimal digit.

Both Burgoyne and Nao have extensive practices of collaboration with other writers and artists, though this is their first work produced in collaboration with each other. After first meeting at a Zoom reading, exchanging messages via Zoom’s private chat function, Nao interviewed Burgoyne about her latest collection Because the Sun, and concluded that a book needed to come out of this admiration. The sweeping and transcendent book that emerged from this mutual admiration is, of course, Mechanophilia, which serves, too, as a record of the kind of friendship that inevitably arises out of the countless hours shared in a collaborative Google Doc.

I was lucky to have attended both the Montreal launch and the Zoom launch back in March, where Burgoyne and Nao described collaborating with each other in such terms as “catching the wave of the other’s genius” and “a galaxy expanding itself in real time.” I was curious about what such a collaboration felt like—what Nao called “an antidote to poetic isolation,” what Burgoyne described as “a form of play.” My questions approaching this review were thus: how might a review be a collaboration? How can a review be a kind of play? What is the reviewer’s (my) place in this “galaxy expanding itself in real time”? My ‘review’ above is a start to addressing these questions, a way for me to feel as the authors felt, being “in between each other’s sentences.” I took an assortment of lines from the book and modified them lightly, and in doing so immersed myself not only in the two poets’ rich and troubling language but also in the electric atmosphere of their collaboration, that intimate relation of holding someone else’s sentences, imagining how they end, extending them, adopting bits of each other’s mannerisms. Where, as Nao says, “every single sentence feels like opening a box of chocolates, seeing what’s going to be inside,” the sentence may not be such a lonely place, after all.

The overarching narrative of the book “follows the omniscient conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet,” attempting also to “queer and rewrite” these myths while bringing in present-day figures ranging from Donald Trump to Ryuichi Sakamoto. In one section of the book, Cain, a strict vegetarian having just killed Abel for “an oblation much desired by God,” launches into a hilariously inventive complaint to God:

Why can’t
you
appreciate a zucchini’s thin velvet movements?
Life is too short
to
have a
tantrumic
relationship with summer squash. Life is too short to
spend less than an eon outside the shelter of
huddled cauliflowers
Gregorian chanting to soil.

A few pages later, Cain transitions to Caina, only to be repeatedly misgendered by God, who responds to her complaint:

I expect you
to manifest your gender expression more tactfully, or at least less loudly.
Homophobia isn’t my primary native language
but you know that I am fluent
in bestowing grief unnecessarily
so as to teach
my subordinates
elaborate lessons they do not need to
abide by, only to provoke a sanguinary appetite
which now you may blame me
exhaustively and
galactically for.

Where this collaboration really stands out, for me, is in the leap—often surprising, at times heartwrenching—from one line to the next, from one poet’s pen to the other’s. When God says to Caina, “it’s because I love you / without any conditions, by which I mean / I love you / the way a shepherd loves sheep and also mutton," this last line lands with the force of a punch. In addition to the more obvious implications of God loving his children as a shepherd loves mutton, there is also the context of how it was written. Because Burgoyne and Nao wrote alternating lines, one poet presumably wrote the lines “it’s because I love you” and “I love you,” while the other wrote “without any conditions, by which I mean” and “the way a shepherd loves sheep and also mutton”—one voice effusive with love, the other measured, contingent, verging on predatory.

Above all, Mechanophilia is the embodiment of a relational poetics. It begins from the premise of a single guaranteed reader, whose presence is unconditional and absolute: this is the other writer, countries away and yet brought intimately near in the gathering place of the page. The writing that emerges from such a collaboration can be nothing short of visceral, unthinkable. This collaboration, as it is recorded in Mechanophilia, is at once totally felt, in the charge between two successive lines, and enthrallingly unimaginable, these shared, parallel lives of “eating, cooking, planting, not planting, buying, teaching, reading, painting” to which the general reader is not privy. This is a book of getting to know someone for the first time, of writing to the only reader that matters—you.

The epilogue gives us a glimpse into the book’s shimmering subtext in the chat box of the collaborative Google Doc, which “maps an epistolary acquaintance, charts a friendship in the making, and Mechanophilia is its shadow, its dream, its under-the-floorboards heart, friendship’s supraliminality.” It ends with a promise not only to the reader but also, I imagine, to each other: “This project will continue until we die. This is the first book. A genesis in more ways than one.”