Acclaimed and prolific local poet Valerie Hsiung, whose work pushes past the limits of genre and grammar, joined us virtually to present her fourth full-length collection, winner of the Colorado State University Poetry Center’s 2019 Open Book Prize. An assemblage of verse, prose poems, scenes, and performance scores, outside voices, please lives in the hidden enmeshments between and underneath the individual stories, events, and facts of gendered and racialized violence, intergenerational trauma, diaspora, and the labor and exploitation involved in making art. Hsiung was joined by poet Ginger Ko for a moving conversation about solitude, belonging, and relating to language and art as “children of the diaspora.” (Recorded February 22, 2022)
