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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.
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. He teaches creative writing and media studies at Pace University in New York City.
Summary
Pushcart Prize-winning author Chris Campanioni tells a story about the silences of generational trauma and the tenuous conditions in which stories get passed down in migration, a surface flimsy enough to allow the traffic between novel, notebook, reportage, and myth.
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.
Foreword
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