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About the Author

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.
“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

“Tender and bruising, Kimberley Chia Qin’s poems build in intensity throughout this collection as they explore the indelible aches and hurts dealt by those closest to us, and even by ourselves. “I want to write beautiful things / in this life”, says Chia - and by the time we arrive at these words we are convinced that this is a beauty defined, not dulled, by life itself.”
—Theophilus Kwek

“‘[T]he body always revolting, committing / arson from the inside’: in Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues, Kimberley Chia Qin demonstrates a remarkable range of formal control, magnifying details otherwise lost in the passage between doubts and resolutions, faith and free will, escape and return. Her poems are deliciously lucid: ‘Everyone knows that every bread is only as good as its history.’ Matrilineage appears both as a ‘bracing shiver’ and ‘a voice [that] would venture from the umbilicus’. The voices in her poems are transnational, lyrical, ravenous, and, by turns, comic: ‘Maybe the corpse is missing because it is / finding itself in Bali.’ The book demands to be read to a packed auditorium, on a girl’s night out, and during those quiet hours when one interrogates the terror and beauty of human connection: ‘Will love / seem more moral than myth, / can love find the path to a clearing? // Mother, teach me. // Mother, it burns. // Mother, tell me this: is love at home?’ Chia’s collection is a masterclass in the intersection between spoken word and page poetry.”
—Tim Tim Cheng
Kimberley Chia Qin (b.1999, she/her) is a writer and movement-maker who creates as an act of tenderness. Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Kopi Break Poetry and Sine Theta Magazine, among others, and has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net anthologies.

As a performance poet, she is interested in stretching the borders of spoken word. She has been featured at venues in Singapore and France, and debuted her multidisciplinary spoken word and dance set at triple bill Out and Up in 2025.

Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues is her debut collection of poetry.

Authors

Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues