"Why are some people’s pores open in their aloneness? Valerie Hsiung asks, in this, the most—maybe only—honest biography I’ve ever read. Is it a biography? It is the consequence of a porousness (i.e. of being perforated) that seems to be the consequence, in turn, of being made to live the impossible state of perpetual estrangement as self-enchantment, the impermanent state of metamorphosis as permanence. Hsiung’s writing has accompanied and seen me through so many incarnations; I am ready for what The pedestrian will make of me—will make of all of us—next.“
          - Brandon Shimoda

"The pedestrian is a map to a terrain of shards and shadows. While reading it, I felt lost only to the land of the normative, a lush fugitivity. I traveled far with, because of, and in this book. Hsiung trusts in the politics of decomposition, making syntaxes that have been distorted by grief, and thus sharpened to what cannot be colonially extracted. Writers like this know that grammar, vocabulary, and the sentence itself are haunted, so they write not to exorcise or cure this condition of its ghosts, but to make a place for them to live, a place they belong.“
         - Johanna Hedva

"Two is a confounding number, asserting, through its adjacency to one, the split from which consciousness proceeds. In the third person, Valerie establishes a self in two parts, living two lives, witnessing in memory an architecture of diasporic remembrance at odds with Proustian time. The past in The pedestrian is cellular—replicated, split, migrated— its membranes stretched by Valerie’s devoted prose, its unsentimental attunement to the fray of love and loss. She renders what’s closest—a mother, a house, a child—radically extimate. An inversion inviting, at the turn of every mundane gesture, history’s ravenous ghost (eating is always a reminder of hunger). Legs splayed open, birthing herself with each new paragraph, She is a revelation. She shows how perfect the sentence can be as a place to keep the wound active. A staggering act of containment enabling us to remain in touch with the break, and to find, in the split, all of life’s surplus.“
         - Mirene Arsanios

"The pedestrian is intimate as an ultrasound of the past, revealing a many-chambered organ haunted by someones, somethings and others. A cross between medium and technician, Valerie Hsiung meticulously probes the uncanny gap between before and after with a language devised for this purpose and no other. Precise, unflinching and subtle, Hsiung’s sentences shift to meet the unspeakable where it lives—within.“
          - Anne de Marcken

"Silky grief, kinetic gaps and dislocations, and a potent, trance-like narration that brushes and brushes against the inarticulable. Valerie Hsiung’s The pedestrian is entirely outside of category, awakening nerves long dormant through its gorgeous obliquity, its charge of fresh music. The hypnosis is plainly startling, entangling the reader and guiding her into the most otherworldly of spaces: the other worlds rushing forth, ungovernable, inside this one. In place of the usual tired meanings comes the largesse of mystery and deeper, stranger voices. The pedestrian is an antidote ampule to memory’s cliches. No, not just memory’s cliches—to any force that conspires to sever the dreaming from the waking.“
          - Jenny Xie

“Is it innocence to think that if you hold onto something long enough (community, relationship, attention) the habitual will give way to the extraordinary? The “person of insouciance” relating this logbook narrative evolves through the willful and unsuspecting ironies that threaten to foil the aim of artists and revolutionaries alike. The Naif so deranges intention with particulars—that is, with wonder—as to turn everyday fact into speculative fiction. A new way of living may yet prevail, thanks to Hsiung’s encouragement, akin to the spores of a mushroom, or to winning the lottery, waiting for us all along, as though in advance of the beginning.”
           - Roberto Tejada

“A philosophical rumination that pulls us all the way into its depths, The Naif is an abstract painting made of words and sentences and punctuation or lack thereof, a distant memory whose skin you get to touch and feel as you attempt to find your way through its centers and peripheries. The Naif is an attempt for “reconciliation” between what we try to do in life while we have “already gone off course,” while we navigate an intimate piece of clothing dangling on a chair, cheese, mouse, juice gone bad, a lamp, a gift shop, all the what and the who of the everyday guiding us toward the word “transcend.” Kneading a slippery “new way of life” into a shape that is shifting and grounding, Valerie Hsiung shares with us her being in and out of community, in intimacy and in selfness. She invites us to “conduct ourselves according to the pulse of each other without losing the pulse of ourselves” while we immerse ourselves in the pulse of her beautiful language offering.“
          - Poupeh Missaghi

“Valerie Hsiung’s To love an artist is a work composed of dislocations--or rather, durations, expanses of dislocated voices, bodies, and narratives. It is a series of studies on ductility and leaching--what we are at our base and what we become when brought, whether violently or voluntarily, in proximity to others, other species of being, other modes of existing, other methods of naming: the lines we cross, “Language from bronze infects language from copper.” When the poet writes, “Today, I speak a language of brutes,” I read the enfoldment of the cruelty our collective and respective histories into the languages of our subjectivity. Any expression of self or free-ness or united-ness is laden with material and intentions that do not belong to us. We have been mixed forever, we have been poured and burned through borders always, and are ourselves burned and poured through. And that is why it is useful to invent forms for the expression of our alloyed selves, to be non-knowing. To love an artist presents a despondent, broken, scattered form. Yet, it pulses with nuance and engagement. It’s beautiful, irreverent, and dangerously incoherent. It stays with you when you’ve stopped reading it and puts your seeing in disarray. It nourishes and it fails and it teaches. This is a book of refusal. It is a cosmography written as metallurgy; it wants to be the dust and it wants to be the friction.”
            - Renee Gladman

“To love an artist is to be drawn into her world so that you become a co-creator with her; To love an artist is to enter both a bestiary and topiary of language where the latter contorts and morphs through strange yet recognizable beauty; To love an artist is to enter the worlds of philosophy, history, politics, and most importantly the quotidian—passing seamlessly from poetry, to the essay, to reflection, to observation while remaining always within the landscape of poetry, as you navigate its repetitions and obsessions and become co-creator; it is to witness the play inherent in language as it meanders “the abyss between literacy and what (the poet) meant to say.”  To love an artist is to indulge in a form of disquisitionary poetics with a sometimes wry humour and all the while looking at the world aslant. It is astonishingly original work—To love an artist.”
            - M. NourbeSe Philip

“This book descends like a feral cloud from the abyss, able to change the weather of its reader through a hypnotic, swaying performance. A multidimensional braid of gestural vibrancy and "autobiographical transnational history" threads this temporally fluctuating lyric graveyard of intimate energies. Hsiung reminds readers to "slow down the vessel" to consider the ways in which the poet ionizes meaning, memory, and language itself, blurring the "frames within each frame" into new organisms rising and singing from the worm-rich mulch of The only name we can call it now is not its only name."
          - Angel Dominguez