Valerie Hsiung is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of multiple poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming 2024), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, 2023), featured recently in BOMB, To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022), selected by Renee Gladman for the 2021 Essay Press Book Prize, outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the 2019 CSU Open Book Prize, Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), and e f g (Action Books). Her writing has appeared in print (Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Believer, Chicago Review, digital vestiges, The Nation, New Delta Review, Verse), in flesh (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works, and public streets and trails she has walked on and hummed along for years. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
“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
- 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
“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
"In this shifting assemblage of verse, prose poems, scenes, performance scores, charts and maps, ‘Time unjumping from windows,’ 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: ‘Let us form the obtuse and acute angles of this assaulted triangulation.’"
- Lauren Russell
"Valerie Hsiung’s outside voices please is earful of delicate worms wriggling and crisscrossing ocean box. Scattered mouths on its own island. Ocean twisting full of video monitor eyes paging through dead news. Girl flipped around bench tasting each hinge in plastic word. What’s in pocket of each word, the books asks of blurred language? Savage corner you turn around, angle your eye slides down, a close record of each infiltration."
- Ching-In Chen
“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
- Lauren Russell
"Valerie Hsiung’s outside voices please is earful of delicate worms wriggling and crisscrossing ocean box. Scattered mouths on its own island. Ocean twisting full of video monitor eyes paging through dead news. Girl flipped around bench tasting each hinge in plastic word. What’s in pocket of each word, the books asks of blurred language? Savage corner you turn around, angle your eye slides down, a close record of each infiltration."
- Ching-In Chen
“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
“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
- Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
“A storied, oscillating breath-scape, a wondrous tertium quid, Valerie Hsiung’s You & Me Forever maps a world that moves as simultaneously paradoxical, relational, and permutational. Edged with the epic, speech-based and strange, the writings enact the promise of dreams as they address matters of hauntings and bodies, displacement, and the nature of capital, exile, and art. Here the narrative ripples, achieves both temporal and spatial possibilities, works both boundariness and dissolve. A destabilizing marvel.“
- Hoa Nguyen
"The first time I read Valerie Hsiung’s You & Me Forever, I had a vision of a bonfire in which countless volumes of love-twisted and love-twisting works of literature, including sculptures and films, were reduced to ash, and from the ashes were intuitively yet precisely drawn filaments on which were inscribed prophetic dialogues that voiced the poet’s relationship with the forces that would come to make, and perpetually threaten to unmake, her world. The second time I read You & Me Forever, there was neither filament nor fire, but an animated frieze, or maybe rainfall, or serrated light, of intimate retribution, that is retributive intimacy. I say read, but that is not exactly what happened."
- Brandon Shimoda
“In the fleeting, quicksilver language of Valerie Hsiung’s You & Me Forever, accumulated peripheries jostle, rock on the waters, gain some traction, but they never quite settle. The worlds Hsiung delicately folds together create friction, a low steady hum builds and then disperses — only to try and build again. We, the reader, are invited to sit inside the hum of this continual construction, to place our bodies in the chamber alongside the many other bodies that fill You & Me Forever. A thread pulls us along. What saline logic this book holds.”
- Asiya Wadud
- Rosa Alcalá
- e f g (Action Books, 2016)
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YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020)
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Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners, 2020)
- outside voices, please (CSU, 2021)
- To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022)
- The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, 2023)
- The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)
Sept 23rd 2022 Friday 7:00pm MT
Counterpath (Denver, CO)
w/ Eric Baus, Ahja Fox, Peter Gizzi
Oct 1st 2022 Saturday 1:00-2:30pm PT
Ten Years of Convergence @ University of Washington, Bothell (Virtual)
w/ Andrea Abi-Karam, Kazim Ali, Yanara Friedland, Jen Hofer, Philip Metres, Tracie Morris, Cecilia Vicuña
Oct 13th 2022 Thursday 8:00pm ET
BathHouse Journal Volume 23 Launch Celebration (Virtual)
w/ Megan Duffy, Mack Gregg, Deborah Meadows, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Dinisha Thompson
Oct 17th 2022 Monday 7:00pm MT
Jack Kerouac School Fall Symposium Faculty Reading @ Naropa (Boulder, CO)
w/ Steven Dunn, Michelle Naka Pierce
Oct 27th 2022 Thursday 7:00pm ET
Greetings Reading Series @ Unnameable Books (Brooklyn, NY)
w/ Dara Barrois/Dixon, Brittany Dennison
Nov 2nd 2022 Wednesday 7:00pm ET
Poet-in-Residence Reading @ University of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN)
w/ Mike Corrao
Mar 9th 2023 Thursday 7:00pm PT
AWP Off-Site: CSU, Rescue, Annulet @ Bad Bar (Seattle, WA)
w/ Sara Deniz Akant, Mike Walsh, Adrienne Raphel, Sarah Minor, Rajiv Mohabir & more
Mar 10th 2023 Friday 6:00pm PT
AWP Off-Site: Counterpath @ Ada’s Technical Books & Cafe (Seattle, WA)
w/ Rae Armantrout, Eleni Sikelianos, Ronaldo Wilson, Edwin Torres, Rodrigo Toscano, Urayoan Noel & more
Mar 10th 2023 Friday 7:00pm PT
AWP Off-Site: Essay Press & Kelsey Street @ Common Area Maintenance (Seattle, WA)
w/ Diana Khoi Nguyen, Andrea Abi-Karam, Steven Dunn, Dennis James Sweeney & more
Mar 10th 2023 Friday 8:00pm PT
AWP Off-Site: Futurepoem, Action Books, Switchback @ Bad Bar (Seattle, WA)
w/ Ghayath Almadoun, Julie Carr, Paul Cunningham, Jessica Q. Stark & more
Apr 13th 2023 Thursday 7:00pm ET
Book Launch for Carrie Oeding’s If I Could Give You a Line @ Twenty Stories (Providence, RI)
w/ Mary-Kim Arnold, Carrie Oeding
May 15th 2023 Monday 8:00pm ET
The Poetry Project (New York, NY)
w/ Ada Smailbegovic
May 27th 2023 Saturday 7:00pm ET
Salon Salvage at Weathered Wood Studio (Troy, NY)