You + Me Forever

Literature & Fiction

Hsiung, Valerie

Poetry

Action Books

Poetry. Valerie Hsiung's powerful, fugue-like procession of words continues in her third full-length collection, EFG (EXCHANGE FLOWING AND GENE FLOW). Her words seem to prick you as pins amidst her nostalgia and floral lines that ribbon the reader into being immersed in the enthrall of her deep and varying worlds. Her dynamic switches of register and the punch of her refrains express a full range of the bizarre textures of lived experience. In this trilogy of self-examinations, explorations of poetic space, and declarative concoctions, Hsiung opens an uncommon reality. EFG's terse, erratic portrait snowballs through this and lineates and recombines into new forms in a way that wakes itself again and again.

To Love an Artist is a book of tracing and traveling through different practices of marking time and space-from the archaeological to the choreographical, architectural, and meteorological. Through an inheritance passing down several long sequences that unravel and re-combine ecological evidences, biblical/military/technocratic narratives, bureaucratic jargon, and the crypt/crip'd of family mythology emerge curses, (mis)pronunciations, tonics, prospectings, topplings, hopscotch, prosthetics, selves nesting within selves, lathes turning upon other lathes, in a newfound extramundane of the fractal and fissure(d).

To Love an Artist

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Essay Pr

About the Author\nValerie Hsiung is the author of hummingbird et partygirl (Essay Press, forthcoming), Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners, 2020), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), and E F G (Acton Books, 2016).\n"In OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE, Hsiung orchestrates a symphony of voices past, present, and prescient: time (and with it, history) compresses and expands, yielding long poetry sequences reminiscent of Myung Mi Kim's sonic terrains and C.D. Wright's documentary poetics." 
--Diana Khoi Nguyen 
"In this shifting assemblage of verse, prose poems, scenes, performance scores, charts and maps...Hsiung's speaker emerges through clashes of language and its structures--its traumatized syntax, its colonialist dictionaries, its abusive evasions, its obfuscating corporate speak, its xenophobia and its patriarchalism, and its capacity to scorch and dazzle. Out of the urgent "confrontation of language," OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE issues an utterly new invitation into and beyond language."--Lauren Russell 
"There's a kind of disease to speaking in Hsiung's OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE. Like it's hacking something up out of the psychic, xenophobic, (neo)colonial bullshit that is English. Like it ingested history and agitated, agitated, agitated it."--Aditi Machado 
"Hsiung's OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE is densely synaptic, a rewarding cascade within the confines imposed by our well-realized but half-understood systems of meaning, living, and language-making... Hsiung shows us that very connection has an impact, and every encounter changes us. To read the world through outside voices please is to feel challenged and also to feel seen. Are you ready to enter?"--Ginger Ko 
"OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE moves the mundane and intimate violence of English-as-axis-language outside, where it plays out as gash, ripple, unforgivingly abrupt verses, fragments, and something loud enough to disrupt the propriety of colonialism."--Raquel Salas Rivera 
Literary Nonfiction.

outside voices, please

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Unspooling from a mysterious and deeply discomforting encounter between the speaker and "K," THE ONLY NAME WE CAN CALL IT NOW IS NOT ITS ONLY NAME slowly morphs into a long and impossibly personal examination of willfulness and ownership, mother tongue and mother earth, chronic illness (of body and soil), homelessness and exile, violence and place, severance and longing, private parts and public spaces, intimacy and institution, affliction and ardor, performativity, faciality, vernaculars, voice, filth, instinct, and clowning. Written in a suspended moment when Hsiung experienced a profound crisis of silence in her life, what begins as a truly hybrid interrogation of an interrogation between student and teacher contorts into an entangled and incantatory excavation of the origins of a poet's psyche and relationship with the world itself. A work that was not composed but decomposed by way of worms and flies and a hazardous exposure to the elements of mythology, ecology, and epistemology, The only name we can call it now is not its only name is both a perennial coalescing convalescence between individual and societal specters and the tectonic documentation of a repeated attempt to endure. "Valerie Hsiung's The only name we can call it now is not its only name takes us through the territory/lessness of the exiled: what is done to location, how one locates the self and community, and the journey to arrival should there be one. The tongue of the exiled contains multitude voices and forms. Hsiung's poems speak to me about the performance of arriving at language reached through translations, through arrangements of letters that is also a displacement of other letters, territories, and bodies. The twists and detours in the story of 'a place where I could not speak at first. I had to learn,' speaks also to the journey to language the autobiography of community. What we think of as voice is not free of the politics of dispossession. In this landscape, the only certainty is that of impermanence and of change. The poems resist the meanings we might ascribe to it, slip into forms when we think we know its name. It's a stunning collection."--Tsering Wangmo Dhompa "The only name we call it now is not its only name moves immediately beyond the realm of the bound book into an aeriel and psychedelic projection of mind, a continuously unfolding pattern that we can only ascertain from above the earth and through the concurrent music of clashing fragments. Hsiung's text maintains its velocity and charm through perfectly timed peripheral detail giving way to the crystallized ongoing, luminous present. I never wanted to leave this book as it so closely illustrates the way a poet thinks back on reality: posing words as free-floating enclosures, sound being used as a necessary weapon of defense and our experience of being surrounded by language, helpless to continue listening and binding and throwing the line back out in new, unquantifiable formations."--Cedar Sigo Poetry. Hybrid.

The only name we can call it now is not its only name

Counterpath Press

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Books by Hsiung, Valerie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hsiung, Valerie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

You + Me Forever

efg

To Love an Artist

outside voices, please

The only name we can call it now is not its only name