Soft Science
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Paris Review Staff Pick
A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
"Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology." —Publishers Weekly
"Franny Choi combines technology and poetry to stunning effect." –BUSTLE
“…these beautiful, fractal-like poems are meditations on identity and autonomy and offer consciousness-expanding forays into topics like violence and gender, love and isolation.” –NYLON
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her second collection, Choi (Floating, Brilliant, Gone) creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology. The speaker states her method at the outset: "you start with// what you know / hands, hair, bones, sweat / then move toward what you know /// you are// not / animal, monster, alien, bitch." Poems riff on the work of British mathematician Alan Turing, whose 20th-century tests for the limits of machine thinking set artificial intelligence into motion: "The scientist called me hard, and I softened my smile. The scientist called me / soft, and I broke sentences to prove him wrong and what and what did I prove / then did I." These poems demolish known and weary binaries: "I am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist / I rage & all you see / is broken glass / a chair / sliding toward the window." Porn sites, tweets, chat rooms, and machine translations abound as Choi questions identity and consciousness in a world full of artificial intelligence, achieving in queer lyric form the most ambitious dream of A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway's 1985 work that undergirds the collection: to speak what Haraway calls "a powerful infidel heteroglossia."
