Franny ChoiRecensioni

Rating poetry is hard. I still have the suspicion that when I don't get it or think it's silly/pretentious/being overly obscure on purpose it's because I'm not interrogating the text from the correct perspective. But hey, that's my issue.

Here are the ones that really worked for me:

- "Glossary of Terms," especially that I could go back and reference it and feel like I was getting another layer out of some of the other poems. Also some of the individual bits, like "Star" x "Dreams of being:" "reached".

- "A Brief History of Cyborgs" - repetition used v well

- "Afterlife"

- "Perchance to Dream"

- "Chi," though I don't know the source material (Chobits). Would rec reading the third section aloud, if just to yourself.

- "Chatroulette"

- "Turing Test_Love" - especially

remember / all humans / are cyborgs / all cyborgs / are sharp shards of sky / wrapped in meat / be delicate / as you approach this subject / not all humans are ready / to call themselves / glass stalactites / pissing the bed / remember / they love their blood / even as they retch / at the smell of it

and

remember / where all that silicon comes from / for the ocean so loved / the quartz / feldspar / the tiny homes of tiny creatures / that she ground them / into sand / to keep them close / to kiss them with / well / I suppose you would call it / a mouth

See also "Glossary of Terms"!

- "Solitude"

- many but not all parts of "Perihelion: A History of Touch"

(Choi is queer, but this book only talks about straight relationships & sexuality.)

The book is composed of five untitled sections, and the first section hits hard with the world ending in progress. With a list of all the apocalypses the world has already experienced. All of the dystopias we are currently living under.

And then it somehow gets darker, the second section delving more specifically into the worlds that ended through her ancestry -- the occupation and division of Korea. Comfort women. World War II and the atomic bomb. Riot cops. The harrowing line "I come from a short line of women who were handed husbands as salvation from rape."

I imagined/hoped that the collection would be building toward the world going on, to poems of how to live in/love the world even as it is ending, but that is not what happens here. Instead, the fourth section imagines a future world where the ongoing apocalypses have taught us something about how to make the world better. Poems that look back on today the way we look back on the horrors of the Inquisition, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, any past genocide. The most joyful poem in the collection, "Wildlife," is a riff on a quote from Amy Goodman, when she slipped and described a wildlife explosion in Canada rather than a wildfire. Pine martens and black-footed ferrets, shrikes and warblers, short-horned lizards come burbling and giggling out of an oil field.

The final section delivers us back to the present, to doom and loss and loneliness, and finally to the rage we will need to wrench the world from its current path to ruin.

Really, I finished this book feeling flattened, emptied, like most of a day later the air is still just slowly trickling in.

Recommended for fans of Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice and readers feeling a need to cry about the state of the world before waking up ready to fight to fix it.½

Fantastic writing. Loved the dynamics of each poem and the diversity of the structure. I felt the central theme while also enjoying the nuance of each poem. Although some left me desolate and nihilistic. Others gave me a renewed sense of hope and a spring in my step. Although I couldn’t personally relate to a lot of the subject matter I know this wasn’t written for me to resonate with in that way. And I appreciate the opportunity to read from a perspective so different from my own.

This book quickly became one of my favorite things I've ever read. My favorite poems were Celebrate Good Times, Science Fiction Poetry, Grief Is A Thing With Tense Issues, Comfort Poem, Unlove Poem, How To Let Go of the World, On How, and Waste. This book has inspired me in my search for poetry that I understand and that makes me feel understood. I feel understood for my trauma in a way I haven't felt before. It's nice. :]

This was an outstanding collection! Explorations of dystopia in our contemporary world, powerful lines about grief, and even some speculative poems. My favorites were “Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel,” “It Is What It Is,” “Science Fiction Poetry,” and “How to Let Go of the World.”½

Very much an impulse selection at the library. It seemed dimly familiar, as if I'd heard of it somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. Once I opened it though, I was instantly in love.

Written from the point of view of a cyborg, these poems examine humanity, gender, intelligence, grief, sexuality, compassion, and more. I loved too many poems to call out favorites, was too moved to write clever critique. I kept this book out of the library WAY too long and racked up WAY too many fines and I will need to order my own copy to keep if this quarantine ever ends and I have to one day return it.

Shockingly vulnerable, yet incredibly cerebral at the same time. All the stars.

Some really gorgeous poems; Choi does spoken word and it's pretty clear, so I'd strongly recommend reading these poems out loud. There's a whole flow of emotions within it that are all handled with such tenderness. Fave poems include "Notes on the Existence of Ghosts," "Pussy Monster," "Too Many Truths," and "Heaven is a Fairly Tale (& Vice Versa)."

Choi has a mastery of words that I haven't seen in a while. Reading these poems made me feel like I know her a little bit, and some of them felt like a gut punch. I'm glad I recommended this volume to our library for purchasing. Full review to follow.

Choi's collection caught me at a time when I needed a reckless, smattering of poems, each one carrying its own agenda, veering into questions of identity, meaning, phenomenonology. There's a fearlessness I found in this work that, far from being refined, is a real shot of what it means to live in the midst of the modern American milieu.

Soft Science is so goddamn seering! Choi's concept is high but she pulls off the interweaving of technology and scientific vocabulary with vulnerability and (as much as one can) raw all too human experiences.

Spoken word feel, darkly beautiful illustrations. I liked this one a lot.