outside voices, please

"In outside voices please, Valerie 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. Hsiung’s own geography is inclusive of handwritten documents, multi-communicative (verbal and nonverbal) mini-plays, erasures, concrete poetry, and meta-commentary notes. Certainly this is a poetics of witness, of approaching atrocities too ignoble to repeat, but impossible not to excavate. 'It’s war,' Hsiung proclaims, 'A war out here. And we're preparing for it to get much, much worse.'" —Diana Khoi Nguyen

"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

"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 is a poet, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including To love an artist (Essay Press), outside voices, please (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners, 2020), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), and e f g (Action, 2016). Her poethics is concerned with thresholds (btw speech & song, the literal & the symbolic, the private & the mythic, the ecologic & the cosmic, the political & the metaphysical, the hypogeal & the levitational, hermitage & pilgrimage, the scientific & the incantatory, the heavy & the petty, deadpan & burlesque, and Mackey’s orphic & orphan), the opaque and the incorrect and the lag as they exist within eco-crip time, modes of decomposition, and ongoingness/chronicity. Her work can be found in places such as The Nation, The Believer, New Delta Review, The Adroit Journal, Ghost Proposal, Black Sun Lit, The Rumpus, Chicago Review, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, and beyond. She has performed at Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project, Poetic Research Bureau, and Shapeshifter Lab, and her writing has been commissioned by Montez Press Radio and Downs & Ross. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives between nowhere and somewhere.