Alice hlidkova
On Value, Art and the Unmeasurable
Part of The Psithur Project
Alice Hlidkova discusses the books and ideas that shape her writing and explores value, art and the unmeasurable in her poem Ledgers & Margins, featured in The Psithur Project.
Alice’s short story Ledgers and Margins will be featured in Pynewood’s upcoming anthology, Psithur, set for release in Jan 2027.
Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your writing and what you’re working on at the moment?
I am a Czech-born, New York–raised writer based in Valencia, Spain, and author of the novel Pretty Girl Complex and the short-story collections Strange Things Married People Do and Love You, Again. My work has appeared in Club Hemingway VLC Anthology Vol. 1 and The Elpis Letters: A Collective.
I studied creative writing at New York University and hold a Master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. My poem ‘Chocolate Road’ was nominated for the 2026 Chrysalis BREW Poetry Award. I currently host the Storytelling Valencia community on Meetup and regularly do reads at Book Lovers Valencia.
At the moment I’m writing On Being, an eleven-book literary series exploring what it means to be human, beginning with On Being Naked.
Your poem Ledgers & Margins explores the relationship between value and the things that resist measurement. Could you tell us a little about the ideas that shaped the poem?
Pauline Réage’s Story of O influenced me deeply when I first read it in my twenties.
It taught me about the elegance of desire, sexuality, and embodiment, and how these subjects could be explored through literature.
Combined with my own life experiences, as most of my stories are rooted in true events, it encouraged me to write what I know.
Your poem Ledgers and Margins will be featured in Pynewood’s upcoming release Psithur; can you give us a sneak peek into the poem?
We live inside systems that measure value through accumulation, productivity and exchange. But what happens when those measures fail? What is a life worth when what gives it meaning cannot enter the ledger?
Against the measurable – the $2.36, the $17.78, the cost of food – the poem places what cannot: art, spirit, God, joy, generosity. I wrote Ledgers and Margins around this contradiction. A forest can be property. Garlic can be almost nothing. Yet a head of garlic freely given can outweigh acres of land.
Throughout the poem, value keeps changing currencies. Money becomes eggs, sardines, heat, acreage, a forest; work becomes cracked nails, a pitching chest, a softening belly. The speaker is called a robot, yet everything moving her resists measurement.
Value was never the same thing as price.
More from The Psithur Project
Esi · Yuki Asamura · Matt Elphick · Yvette Chan
Next week we feature poet Fira Lazar, author of Radicle Light.
