Pork Fluff, Tiffany Hsieh

Pork Fluff, the debut collection of prose poetry by Tiffany Hsieh, takes readers on a journey of exploration through the speaker’s experience and reflection as an immigrant from Taiwan in Canada. Delivered in a voice that is unapologetically candid, genuine, and witty, Pork Fluff tackles life and all its tangled-up complexity and mundanity—a life made all the more intricate by the transition between the speaker’s two worlds. In the old world, where “the only people who still eat pork fat in Taiwan are the poor people,” an ah-ma “snores at night and farts during the day.” In the new world, where girls “get those nice calves with toned muscles,” a man “considers not tipping the way Chinese people consider not tipping in Chinese restaurants.” Through examining identity, self, family, community, and home, Pork Fluff prods deep into the struggles of the in-between: part belonging, part un-belonging. Just when “Ma and Ba paid a price to come and my brother and I we played our parts to stay,” everyone is also just “a sleep away from being blown across the ocean back to where they came from.”

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Delicate as a row of braised eggs, the hybrid poems of Tiffany Hsieh’s Pork Fluff rapid-successions us through the language of love via extracting the truth. Hsieh’s speaker is a poetic acrobat who, in every lyric, guts us hard at that 75%-to-end mark, fisheye-Volta-ing into a typhoon of language, changing the calculations of life. Then we get resonance. We get confrontation. We get that honest tenderness holding us, begging us to change our course of thought and action towards resilience and permanence. I give this collection a million metaphorical bucks and all my bok choy love.

– Dorothy Chan, author of Return of the Chinese Femme

Reading Tiffany Hsieh’s debut collection of tiny story poems is like finding a nest of speckled eggs—strange, surprising, haunting and beautiful. Read them, return to them, and let yourself wonder at where they might take you next.

– Lania Knight, author of There Is Fire Here: Essays 

These staccato prose poems sing and bleed about the intricacies of family and gender dynamics, diaspora, the legacies of colonialisms, being othered, first gen and immigrant experiences, literal and metaphorical scars, visceral and traumatic experience and memory, going home, never arriving, layers and covers, Taiwanese North American identities, and so much more! This riveting collection cleverly pulls us in, lulls us with charming, accessible language, unique imagery and an undeniable heart and voice. An exhilarating debut! So glad to have read this dynamic book!

– Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Parachutist