We are delighted to welcome the incredible Valerie Hsiung to Housmans, visiting us from the mountains of Colorado in USA. Joining her we have some of the finest poets working in Britain today.
We will be celebrating Valerie’s latest book,
The pedestrian: 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.
PRAISE:
Why are some people’s pores open in their aloneness? Valerie Hsiung asks, in this, the most—maybe only—honest biography I’ve ever read. Is it a biography? It is the consequence of a porousness (i.e. of being perforated) that seems to be the consequence, in turn, of being made to live the impossible state of perpetual estrangement as self-enchantment, the impermanent state of metamorphosis as permanence. Hsiung’s writing has accompanied and seen me through so many incarnations; I am ready for what The pedestrian will make of me—will make of all of us—next.
-Brandon Shimoda
The pedestrian is intimate as an ultrasound of the past, revealing a many-chambered organ haunted by someones, somethings and others. A cross between medium and technician, Valerie Hsiung meticulously probes the uncanny gap between before and after with a language devised for this purpose and no other. Precise, unflinching and subtle, Hsiung’s sentences shift to meet the unspeakable where it lives—within.
-Anne de Marcken
Silky grief, kinetic gaps and dislocations, and a potent, trance-like narration that brushes and brushes against the inarticulable. Valerie Hsiung’s The pedestrian is entirely outside of category, awakening nerves long dormant through its gorgeous obliquity, its charge of fresh music. The hypnosis is plainly startling, entangling the reader and guiding her into the most otherworldly of spaces: the other worlds rushing forth, ungovernable, inside this one. In place of the usual tired meanings comes the largesse of mystery and deeper, stranger voices. The pedestrian is an antidote ampule to memory’s cliches. No, not just memory’s cliches—to any force that conspires to sever the dreaming from the waking.
-Jenny Xie
The pedestrian is a map to a terrain of shards and shadows. While reading it, I felt lost only to the land of the normative, a lush fugitivity. I traveled far with, because of, and in this book. Hsiung trusts in the politics of decomposition, making syntaxes that have been distorted by grief, and thus sharpened to what cannot be colonially extracted. Writers like this know that grammar, vocabulary, and the sentence itself are haunted, so they write not to exorcise or cure this condition of its ghosts, but to make a place for them to live, a place they belong.
– Johanna Hedva
Two is a confounding number, asserting, through its adjacency to one, the split from which consciousness proceeds. In the third person, Valerie establishes a self in two parts, living two lives, witnessing in memory an architecture of diasporic remembrance at odds with Proustian time. The past in The pedestrian is cellular—replicated, split, migrated— its membranes stretched by Valerie’s devoted prose, its unsentimental attunement to the fray of love and loss. She renders what’s closest—a mother, a house, a child—radically extimate. An inversion inviting, at the turn of every mundane gesture, history’s ravenous ghost (eating is always a reminder of hunger). Legs splayed open, birthing herself with each new paragraph, She is a revelation. She shows how perfect the sentence can be as a place to keep the wound active. A staggering act of containment enabling us to remain in touch with the break, and to find, in the split, all of life’s surplus.
-Mirene Arsanios
OUR POETS:
Amelia Zhou is a writer and researcher. Her book Repose, which interweaves poems, fiction, and lyric essay, was awarded the 2022 Wendy’s Subway Book Prize and published in 2024. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Cambridge, where her research examines the political-aesthetic role of photographic images and tropes in predominantly Anglophone life narratives from the 1970s to the present. She is also currently the Emerging Critics Fellow at the Sydney Review of Books. Born and raised in Sydney, she lives in London.
Azad Ashim Sharma is a writer and publisher based in South London. He is the director of the87press. His work includes Against the Frame (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). His work has featured in publications such as the Asian American Writers Workshop, Stand Magazine, Gutter Magazine, the journal Social and Health Sciences, SPAMzine, MIR Online, and Wasafiri. He is a Chase-funded PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award 2023. He lives in London.
Verity Spott is a poet, blogger, teacher, carer and musician from Brighton, England, and publisher of the independent publishing house Iodine Press. Verity’s books include Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband, 2017), Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press, 2018), Hopelessness (The 87 Press, 2020), Songs of the Morning (slub, 2023) and The North Road Songbook (Pilot Press, 2024). Since 2006, Spott has run the monthly poetry and performance event Horseplay in Brighton.
Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of eight books of poetry including, Desiring Machines, The Blue Split Compartments, The Strong Room, and Cut from the Rushes. She has performed in Europe, Canada, the US, Lebanon, and Chile, and has been invited to speak about poetry by the British Academy, British Council, the BBC, the Arts Council, and the Poetry Society. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, and Croatian.
Ghazal Mosadeq is a poet, editor and translator. She is the founder of Pamenar Press, an independent publisher of poetry, translation, hybrid and critical writing. Her own work has been published by Sheirsman, Fence, Arc Poetry, Firmament, Asymptote, Modern Poetry In Translation and Ugly Duckling Presse (forthcoming), among others. She is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
Valerie Hsiung is a poet who writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry, her books dissolve the borders of poetry, prose, performance and philosophy into a single listening body. She is the author of eight full-length books, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books), 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 outside voices, please (CSU). Recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation and Lighthouse Works as well as grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and PEN America, she teaches writing at the limits of language at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her ceremonial work and pedagogy has been studied by researchers on the subject of emancipatory practices including Sophie Orlando. Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado.
Please note this is a free event but please do book ahead. You can also reserve a copy of the book.
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