HOUSMANS READING SERIES: Valerie Hsiung with Verity Spott, Andrea Brady and others

About this event

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.