VHS

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.

"VHS is not a rollercoaster but a contemplative train journey—a shifting, colorful, and surreal landscape of cities, persons, and memories going by—to bring you out of the grey dullness of everyday life." —Independent Book Review"Deft, poetic, and surprising." —Electric Literature"Campanioni writes with the zeal of John the Evangelist, fueled by a conviction for the Word as the fleshy wet nurse of our modern reality and consciousness in exile. The peripatetic narrator of this dazzling novel, an American offspring of geopolitical exiles, has taken the trauma of his parents’ geographic dislocation and subsumed it into his linguistic and spiritual DNA, into the pith of his narrative bones. VHS takes the now-staid modes of much autofiction, turns them inside out, shocks them with a thousand volts of the Proustian instability of the self, and transmutes them into something memorable, incantatory, and wholly original and alive. A bravura performance with a voyeuristic glee that is as much turned inward as it strives to transfigure moments lost in time with the Word." —Ernesto Mestre-Reed, author of Sacrificio"How can one retrace erased steps to forgotten places? Early in his genre-and-time-bending book VHS, Chris Campanioni writes 'There are things not meant to be seen, not meant to be sorted or sorted out,' and then proceeds with searing curiosity to do just that. The framing of the past and the limits of language and stories to capture the churn of life haunt these pages. The blur of fantasy and fact—history—is parsed and pieced together again through intimate reflections on memory, heritage, and migration in this brilliant lyrical and philosophical adventure. A novel as a screen capture, a guidebook, a reimagination, a reenactment. It’s an act of love to want to understand one’s past, and like all love a mystery. VHS gives me everything I want. All those lightning connections of a brain running hot. The mix of tenderness and depth. Jesus. I am so excited for this book to be out in the world." —Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book"Chris Campanioni has created yet another sexy and stunning book. VHS defies categorization. It revels in its rebellion. It is both nostalgic and visionary, an expertly crafted balance between the surreal and achingly familiar dimensions of memory. As raw and unapologetic as Reinaldo Arenas, Campanioni is a singular talent; a director, cinematographer, poet and superb storyteller rolled into one. VHS is pop. It’s retro. And it has all the makings of a cult classic." —John Manuel Arias, author of Where There Was Fire"The montage and polyvocality of VHS's narrative both dazzles and inspires me." —Hantian Zhang, The Adroit Journal