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.”

"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