The Pedestrian - by Valerie Hsiung (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A poet's novel, a body, a house, where childhood ungrieved meets the horror of displacement.

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.

Review Quotes

"Halfway between Kafka's Singer and Melville's Scrivener, Hsiung's Naif wields syntax as both tuning fork and sensor, sounding a singular diphthong at once cosmic and quasi-comic."

--Joyelle McSweeney, in praise of The Naif

"A new way of living may yet prevail, thanks to Hsiung's encouragement, akin to the spores of a mushroom, or to winning the lottery, waiting for us all along, as though in advance of the beginning."

--Roberto Tejada

About the Author

Valerie Hsiung writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Her work dissolves the borders of poetry, prose, and philosophy into a single listening body, drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry. She is the author of eight books, including The Naif and The only name we can call it now is not its only name. She was born in Ohio and now lives in Colorado.