[07/07/26] Hsiung, Valerie: The Pedestrian

Nightboat Books, paperback

Publication Date: July 7, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 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.