PositiveMichigan Daily...Choi teases human feeling out of the characters and patterns we reserve for machines and computers. List brackets suddenly take on an air of secrecy and volatility, as if whispering a series of possible outcomes while coyly withholding favor for one over the other ... Franny Choi’s second full collection, works to dissolve [the] line between poetry and program, human and machine...Choi explodes the themes of AI, identity and language...into a full-blown exploration of what it means, exactly, to be alive ... Poetry and code, human and machine, blood and silicon … about halfway through the collection, I lost the ability to determine whether the speaker was flesh or ‘borg. More importantly, Choi convinced me that it didn’t matter ... Choi doesn’t present a clean-cut solution to the complicated intersection of musings on language, race, machine and identity posited in Soft Science. Choi is a poetic realist. What she does, however, is remind us that thought and poetry are not limited to the languages that dominate the field. In fact, she empowers us to challenge such hegemony...
Morgan Parker
RaveThe Michigan DailyParker is a poet of the powerful area between awareness and authority, a writer who will recompose the details around her, brilliantly, until she finds enough space to thrive ... Parker is able to generate command out of nearly any detail ... arker can wring purpose and power from anything, rendering creativity and resilience one and the same ... maintains the sensory creativity of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, but complicates it with historical and sociocultural texture ... Full and heavy it is ... crackles with the power of identity.
Sally Wen Mao
PositiveThe Michigan DailyMao’s poems are front-loaded with detail, flashing handfuls of hot topics, aesthetic trends and buzzwords that capture the attention of a particular audience (millennials and their apologists) just enough to create some interpretive distance between the reader and the more sinister forces at work underneath their poetic Instagram filter ... brimming with information ... the poems in Mao’s collection execute a deft two-punch maneuver. They first generate internal spectacle on the line, distracting from their local plot with flashy words and glittering gadgetry. Then, with this in mind, Oculus as a whole starts to look like spectacle, unveiling the artistic distance between the poetry and the very real, very serious topics and themes it comments on (the text and the notes, if you will). Mao’s poems don’t just comment on spectacle — they literally perform it, unveiling its subtle machinery and complicated network of repercussions right there, right on the page.
