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 is a poet and the author of eight collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid writing, including The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), and please (CSU). 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 turns wooden vessels, alchemizes natural fragrance, and teaches at Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.