Description

Cleveland State University Poetry Center, paperback

Publication Date: October 5, 2021

“In OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE, 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 Kims sonic terrains and C.D. Wrights documentary poetics.”
– Diana Khoi Nguyen

“In this shifting assemblage of verse, prose poems, scenes, performance scores, charts and maps Hsiungs speaker emerges through clashes of language and its structuresits traumatized syntax, its colonialist dictionaries, its abusive evasions, its obfuscating corporate speak, its xenophobia and its patriarchalism, and its capacity to scorch and dazzle. Out of the urgent confrontation of language, OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE issues an utterly new invitation into and beyond language.”
– Lauren Russell

“Theres a kind of disease to speaking in Hsiungs OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE. Like its hacking something up out of the psychic, xenophobic, (neo)colonial bullshit that is English. Like it ingested history and agitated, agitated, agitated it.”
– Aditi Machado

“Hsiungs OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE is densely synaptic, a rewarding cascade within the confines imposed by our well-realized but half-understood systems of meaning, living, and language-making… Hsiung shows us that very connection has an impact, and every encounter changes us. To read the world through outside voices please is to feel challenged and also to feel seen. Are you ready to enter?”
– Ginger Ko

“OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE moves the mundane and intimate violence of English-as-axis-language outside, where it plays out as gash, ripple, unforgivingly abrupt verses, fragments, and something loud enough to disrupt the propriety of colonialism.”
– Raquel Salas Rivera