Coffee House loves a poet-novelist, and Vi's work is a perfect example of why-by taking on language as a set of tools to create a meaning particular to the text at hand, the story of parental grief in Fish in Exile feels piercing, disorienting, and intimate and the opposite of cliché.
Vi's debut novel will come on the heels of her debut poetry collection from Nightboat, a press whose tightly curated list has a devoted reader and bookseller following, which has already created interest in Vi's forthcoming fiction
As difficult as the premise of the novel is, it is also ultimately a hopeful book, one that offers the possibility for people to find their own ways through a profound loss, however bizarre or futile those might seem from the outside
The emotional impact, vulnerability, and sentence-level wow-factor of Fish should find natural readers in fans of A Little Life and books like it, who appreciate a novel's ability to provoke an emotional response
