Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues: Poems

by Kimberley Chia Qin

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.

Genres: Poetry

Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2026

Reviews

[Lavelle · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

what can I say....discuss the relationship between mothers and daughters and i'll start crying

[Wayne Low · Rating 3 out of 5]

On one hand I want desperately to agree with Tim Tim Cheng's praise on the cover, that this book of poems is "Transnational, lyrical, ravenous, and by turns, comic..." but I find that its undoing isnt the poet's voice "insisting on her own arrival", as said by Amanda Chong, but not quite reaching here.

Fuller unemployed ahh review coming, but I do want to share two of my favourite bits.

... How I'd burst onto the scene
with unsavoury splendour -- more gas
than child. As the pills bubble
past foil at her deft insistence,
I scorn my tummy for meekness, wonder
if it is my destiny to sit at tables full
of foods I cannot eat. . .
Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues

... Momentarily, we are suspended between grief and a 2000s sitcom. I could tread this blood, flood my belly button with it. Enter my own womb from the abdomen, try this all again.
Hereditary Grief

[en le ⋆·˚ ༘ * · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful!!!! especially appreciated the intergenerational themes of this collection

[Wen-yi Lee]

on girlhood and mothers and daughters and grandmothers, and love and things in between