By Kimberley Chia QinPoetry/Afterimage Press/Paperback/109 pages/$20.90

Hot girls always seem to be trending. They are having hot girl summers, going on hot girl walks, getting hot girl trademarks.

Most recently in June, American content creator Allie Rose caused an online furore by attempting to trademark the phrase “hot girls read”.

For some years now, the hot girls have been having stomach issues. In this viral TikTok trend that took off in 2022, women get candid about their irritable bowel syndrome and other digestive disorders that have long been stigmatised in polite conversation.

Singaporean poet Kimberley Chia Qin’s debut collection both claims and deconstructs this trend in its investigation of girlhood, womanhood and the liminal state in between. The title poem describes being born as having “burst onto the scene with unsavoury splendour”. Chia could be said to have done the same.

If a hot girl is the object of desire, the contents of her stomach render her abject. Cravings curdle there, as do anxiety, revulsion and other gut feelings. It intimately connects multiple bodily functions such as digestion, menstruation and childbirth.

Chia also makes it the locus of matrilineage, via which she considers the bodies of other women who preceded her.

Her background as a performance poet is evident in the declamatory urgency of several poems, but she also works inventively with visual form. She appends verses in footnotes to a family tree or scatters lines across the book’s gutter to evoke an elderly man’s hoarding.

In My Mother’s Uterus Speaks To Mine, a contrapuntal work which can be read as two separate poems or a single intertwined one, the “mother” and “daughter” poems swell and hollow inversely to one another, their i...