Product details
- ISBN 9781643623115
- Dimensions: 133 x 209mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Nightboat Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
