outside voices, please
outside voices, please
Poems | Valerie Hsiung | October 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7348167-2-3
120 pages
* Winner of the 2019 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition, selected by Nicholas Gulig, Dora Malech, & Sheila McMullin *
Praise for 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
There’s a kind of disease to speaking in Valerie 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. Like a maddened landline whose busy signal intones wickedly, multilingually, polyvocally: “Here is a book for you to read, pernicious reader.” ADITI MACHADO
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. Hsiung writes, ‘Give me an English map / and I will show you an English love, an English rape(d) word.’ Her work brings what has been discarded as noise into verse, turning its back on the imperative to render entire worlds meaningless through erasure. RAQUEL SALAS RIVERA
. . . tests murmur slur, blurs outburst tan-
trum codes inside translation . . . crackin-
g performativity. . . refugee slippage of CA-
ST OF MANY . . . this book is a braver-
y . . . mess and moss “becoming the weap-
on” . . . “you now have two minutes to r-
un outside” pick it up, be brave, say yes . . . GABRIELLE CIVIL
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. The lens of this collection zooms in and out intuitively, prompting the reader to incorporate the cellular, molecular, and viral along with the vastness of the conceptual and cosmological. Hsiung shows us that very connection has an impact, and every encounter changes us. Something gets transformed, something gets left behind, something remains itself, something is a testament to the coercion of change, something is the singing that persists under power differentials. Something, something, something—it’s all in the voices and stories told from the outsiders who intelligently, devastatingly acknowledge their histories and futures in this collection. Smells, textures, memories, visions, electrical connections, and the lived outcomes of political power-play, in all their forms, are included in this worldview. There is also the pleasure that Hsiung’s poetry provides, the drumbeat wordplay that flexes your face and heart as you read over the sedulous and unexpected associations that both reflect and meaningfully distort our saturated world stage. To read the world through outside voices please is to feel challenged and also to feel seen. Are you ready to enter? GINGER KO
To enter into the text of outside voices, please is to plunge into a voice made of all voices, a whirring concert of murmurings, glossolalia, commands, scat and static—the sounds the mind picks up from sheer being. This Voice then articulates the ironies, and the sadism of being stuck in a society that doesn't want freedoms for you, that sets you against others in a market system run on basic desires, that sees its idea of you instead of actual you. The reader's pleasure is in gleaning a wry defiance... all of this through the chords by which the speaker's mind is struck. Here I learned what the intersection of race, sex, diaspora, and listening sounds like: a phenomenal—and dear—ocean. CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING
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, forthcoming), hummingbird et partygirl (Essay Press, forthcoming), outside voices, please (CSU, forthcoming), 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.
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