Franny Choi

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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.

dare i say my favorite poet?? franny choi's diction and rhythm are a song to me & i just adore her voice. can't get enough of it. i admire, too, the sharp focus of this collection. sooo fucking good.

some favorites were: Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula; Wildlife; Dispatches From a Future Great-Great-Granddaughter