by Vi Khi Nao & Sun Yung Shin

Six Tones of Water is an experimental, collaborative poetry manuscript co-written in real time in one document. Word play, translations, and other chimerical births and rebirths of language ride the waves of spontaneous, even divinatory writing, as the borders and blurriness of consciousness make marks on the page. Language’s opacities and transparencies and un-translatabilities create a sort of stickiness, in the throat, the mind, the body, the text; mutual understanding is attained through asymmetries, gaps, noise, silence, lacunae, and also wonder, sounds, tones, violence, forgetting, memory, and beauty. Here, English, a colonial language, is a medium, a plasma, a fourth state of matter, perhaps. On the page, if not in sociopolitics, life spans, and uneven distributions of suffering, there is a kind of restive quality.