Books
The pedestrian (Nightboat Books, 2026)
The pedestrian
A poet’s novel, a body, a house, where childhood ungrieved meets the horror of displacement.
Date: July 7, 2026
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Format: Print
Genre: Poetry, Intergenre
Pre-order from Bookshop, Powell’s, McNally Jackson, Brazos Books & Nightboat
Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself.
Praise
"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
"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
"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
"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.“
"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
- 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
"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
- Johanna Hedva