efg

Poetry. Valerie Hsiung's powerful, fugue-like procession of words continues in her third full-length collection, EFG (EXCHANGE FLOWING AND GENE FLOW). Her words seem to prick you as pins amidst her nostalgia and floral lines that ribbon the reader into being immersed in the enthrall of her deep and varying worlds. Her dynamic switches of register and the punch of her refrains express a full range of the bizarre textures of lived experience. In this trilogy of self-examinations, explorations of poetic space, and declarative concoctions, Hsiung opens an uncommon reality. EFG's terse, erratic portrait snowballs through this and lineates and recombines into new forms in a way that wakes itself again and again.