Vhs

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.

Chris Campanioni is the recipient of the International Latino Book Award, the Academy of American Poets College Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several journals, edited collections, and anthologies, including Best American Essays (HarperCollins, 2022). 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 translations have been published in Beginnings of the Prose Poem: All Over the Place (Commonwealth Books, 2021), his multimedia work 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.