Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues

“I have been waiting for a voice like this—brazen and bare, insisting on her own arrival… A debut collection that talks back to our foremothers, and makes them all proud.”—Amanda Chong

Why do we love in the way that we do? This debut collection by Kimberley Chia Qin takes up the question through the lens of girls coming into their womanhood, and the messy inheritances that shape them. At once a reckoning and a toast, these poems move through family, grief, illness, and a host of other growing pains—tracing how they bind us, how they break us, and how they bequeath us a license to love.

Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues is a remedy against that age-old problem: not quite being a girl, not yet calling oneself a woman. Its poems reach across time and space to gather at a dining table laden with ginseng, kueh, and cut fruit, offering a feast of loss, stolen intimacies and other tender cuts of the human condition—first as a way to live with themselves, and then, finally, as a way to thrive. They ask us all to sit, and eat.