Good Listener is a vivid and inventive collection of poetry that navigates one's identity with the past, the self, and the world. Inspired by many prominent and impactful poets such as Victoria Chang and Pierre Reverdy, Kathryn Hargett-Hsu combines irresistible imagery with unexpected language to take the reader on an expedition through time and space with the landscape of delicate and deliberate form. In this collection, each poem is a story, a lifetime, a magic show-let yourself become enraptured.
Praise for GOOD LISTENER
“It’s true. I’m overgrown with images. / Sometimes I hallucinate.” Good Listener stretches the imagination, each poem a fever dream. This surrealist dive into the interior (“The interior is a country / divided by a river & a sniper on the hill”) jostles and delights with each improbable turn. Wild but taut, electric but cool, this chapbook disorients so it can reveal. Get lost.
—Kemi Alabi, Guest Judge for the 2023 Frontier Poetry Breakthrough Chapbook Contest, author of Against Heaven (2022)
“Sonically lush, syntactically attuned and innovative in image, Kathryn Hargett-Hsu’s Good Listener grapples with both internal and external exchanges… Like a soundwave, these poems vibrate, they resound, and echo back, “silent, at times whispering/ in a tongue you hardly know.” You don’t need to put your ear to these poems to hear their pulse — they make “the position of their tongue known” into “a thousand new words.”
— Flower Conroy, LGBTQIA+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, former Key West Poet Laureate, author of three books including Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder (winner of the Stevens Manuscript Prize)
“Kathryn Hargett-Hsu’s acutely magical verses sear through the world of poetry with razor-sharp metaphor and surprise. Funny and electric, Hargett-Hsu’s poems take being alive very seriously, but renders none of us free of the great laughter that is mankind’s absurdity. From “nuns who pass illicit shortbreads” to the spawning sites of eels, none of us are safe under this debut poet’s gaze. Like a true bard, Hargett-Hsu’s a Good Listener.”
— Shayla Lawson, poet, performance artist, public intellectual, author of multiple books including A Speed Education In Human Being, and I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean