Kathryn Hargett-Hsu’s 2023 Winning Chapbook
Winner of the 2023 Breakthrough Chapbook Contest
Kathryn Hargett-Hsu
Read the chapbook, Good Listener, for free here.
You can purchase the physical book from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Bookshop.org.
Leave a review for Good Listener on Goodreads.
We could not be more thrilled to finally put Good Listener out in the world. Kathryn Hargett-Hsu is a brilliantly tactful poet that makes writing poetry seem effortless yet undeniably purposeful. What a joyful privilege it has been to read, edit, and collaborate on this grand collection of work alongside Kathryn Hargett-Hsu. We are proud and honored to uplift another excellent poet and guide Good Listener into the world.
SYNOPSIS
Selected by Guest Judge Kemi Alabi as the winner of Frontier Poetry’s 2023 Breakthrough Chapbook Contest, 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.
PRAISE
“'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 Hargatt-Hsu’s Good Listener grapples with both internal and external exchanges. Just as one must be receptive to parrot song, a woman 'paler than summer grass, crying,' and to rigs’ 'drizzling music,' one must also calibrate oneself to receive the ‘feral silence of the past,’ the '[q]uestions with no answers/ above ground,' and the ‘low tune dreams hum.’ Meaning, one does not listen with one’s ear alone but also with one’s mind and sense of self—even if that sense is conflicted: 'I can’t tell my voice from other voices/ & other voices are always with me.' 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, former Key West Poet Laureate and author of Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder
"Kathryn Hargett-Hsu’s acutely magical verses sears 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, author of A Speed Education In Human Being & I Think I'm Ready to See Frank Ocean
EXCERPT
