Soft Science

by Franny Choi

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938584992
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Pages:	100
Sales rank:	132,377
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen,  co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.

Editorial Reviews

02/25/2019

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.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

[Soft Science] is accessible for anyone wondering about identity, construction, destruction, and human connection in a digital world. . .” —Lambda Literary
“Your only regret getting this book will be that Choi herself isn’t there to read it to you…” –Fran Tirado, Out Magazine
“[Soft Science] explores the blurs between organic and inorganic, reality and fiction, human and machine." —Rewire.News
“Franny Choi’s Soft Science offers an exceptional exploration both of all that comprises the intimate and of all that consumes the communal in our lives. Whether tracking the adventures of the ‘cyborg’ or eavesdropping on conversations between sisters, it’s all the same world. These striking poems ring through with a singular voice, creating a society that helps us understand our own. When you open a book of poems, ‘isn’t that what you came to see?’ Choi builds a world not only of striking beauty and lucid politics, but also, most importantly, with love.” —A. Van Jordan

From the Publisher