97 pages
Published 2019
Read August 26
Rating: 5 out of 5
Sometimes a poetry collection will be so precisely worded, so breathtaking and deft and subcutaneous, that I forget that anyone could write any other way. Choi’s rhythms and juxtapositions, metaphors and swerving imagery, swept through every ganglion and left me astonished, gasping after their glimpses of profundity, my rib cage splayed in exquisite release. “[ gospel, hornet ],” they murmur in “Program for the Morning After,” and it makes the only sense I’ve ever encountered. In the aftermath of these poems, for a moment at least, nothing else seems to matter.
Science-fictional motifs recur throughout this book: cyborgs, constructed beings, sentient computers, aliens, synonyms for the dehumanizations of society, of bigotry, of nation, of state violence, of sexuality, of trauma. Soft Science excels as a dizzying exploration of genre as a doorway to gender and grief.
One of the best books I’ve read this year.
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