outside voices, please

Author: Valerie Hsiung

Publisher: Cleveland State University Press (2021)

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