If you:

• were the kind of child who realized suddenly, painfully, that you would never inhabit another mind or know the intricacies of what the fuck he’s thinking when your older brother stood in the kitchen before an empty microwave, lighting nothing but the glass plate in its hapless spin—

• spend your time vibrating between states of derealization (in which, while walking your dog, you become convinced of your own ghosthood and grow increasingly anxious that you will simply mist right through the bedraggled maples) and an excruciating hyper-presence (in which the smallest crack of the fridge’s knuckles needles your eardrums)—

• find yourself motion-sick in spirals of constant, recursive thinking about how to fully position myself? how to explain my body? And, then, find those questions forcing you into ever-thornier thought thickets of positionality, relationality, power, always power, and all the ways that you’ve been made to feel powerless, and all the ways that you could be wielding your own power against others (maybe without even realizing), and how to be fully accountable for that, and how to learn to recognize the small animal of your shame that throws such a monstrous shadow, and how to practice not turning away—

• (need a space between these bullet points for your motormouth to, like, actually take a breath)

• see your queerness as a monster-queerness, a Frankenstein-gender, a between-space where fear and tenderness and trauma and an embodied Yes of determined, evolving selfhood all pinball inside your body in breathtaking, multicolored violence—

• find yourself wondering (obsessively, chronically) about where and how consciousness begins, about what the word human even means, anyway, about what portions of the self are really, truly, organic to you and what external forces have shaped you into a body-self that may be beyond your own reckoning, and about how much of you has been machined into being by social structures outside of your control and if control is really the word for what you feel you’re lacking anyway—

—then buckle in and unspool the edges of your fragile being, tender babies, because Franny Choi’s Soft Science is here to body up the gorgeous, cyborg, monstrosity of self, to make a model of both and, to sing to the body living in a myriad of in-betweens as she works to bring herself online.

Soft Science is a love/hate letter to the split, tangled, unmerciful forces at play in Choi’s own body. “I’m not really interested,” Choi says, in an interview with The Rumpus, “in inhabiting a persona that isn’t secretly me…it’s important for me to make others reconcile with the fact that every speaker is me, no matter how discordant it might seem. Maintaining that kind of complicated, shifting subjectivity is important to me on a philosophical and political level, not just an artistic one. It’s a sort of shifting I think is also important to building and inhabiting a cyborg subjectivity.”

Cyborg subjectivity in Soft Science makes its shifting way to the page via cyclical “Turing Test” poems that pose the lyric and the surreal image as the only possible answers to questions like “at what age did you begin to suspect you were alive?” and the ever-loaded (especially for Asian American women) “where did you come from?” Choi’s cyborg, close-to-self speaker also slips into various characters and roles (Chi, the android in the manga Chobits; silent, overlooked, righteously vengeful Kyoko in the film Ex Machina; Tay, Microsoft’s racist AI chatbot). 

Choi’s cyborg speaker constructs and reconstructs herself through the strangeness of language (repeated root-sounds, defamiliarized English conjugations, a meditation on a Korean expression for please) and emerges on the page via an excruciating self-awareness of desire—both organic (whatever that means) to the speaker and imposed on her pieced-together body, the one she must pretend is seamless, infallible, unblemished to the point of being inhuman or godly.

“& isn’t that / what you paid for? isn’t that what you came / to see?        a god on a loop, failing?”

When I try to imagine the body Soft Science constructs, I start by cataloging Choi’s materials. The first is language, of course, being the most ancient and human of technologies. Choi’s poems dissect language and put its organs on display, make a junkyard of all its phonemes. In the junkyard, too, are Chatroulette, Twitter bot digestion and regurgitation, “the musk of rest,” the bodied primacy of sound, half-melted chunks of silica, “Spoiling flour, holy basil, sweat,” quantum physics, “A History of Touch,” the moon, the moon, the moon, “moans warped by an anxious, animal jaw,” police violence, fragments of assault, “two dead cats in my arms,” Pornhub—“the net teeming with pervy fingers,” “My body, my stink, my land to plant in.” 

The poems stitch together the materials—Soft Science is a master class in visible mending. The cyborg works so hard, this many-part being, to construct and fully occupy herself as she “sees, comes, and brings herself online.”

It’s the speaker’s unrelenting vulnerability—

the visible seams where anyone might take a small pair of scissors and deftly undo her—

that makes her godhood fragile, pointless, even irrelevant. 

It’s her godhood itself—

the imposition of it; the cold, flawless image it drapes over the fullness and woundedness of her Self beneath; the nature of godhood existing only in the eye of the beholder; 

the beholder: the American, the engineer, the scientist, the dangerous, begging man, the reader,

and “the reader” includes me,

eyeing the seams of her fragile being—

that makes her vulnerable. 

What’s a god without agency, anyway? A power tool? A magic wand? A weapon?

Choi’s poems ask where failing intersects with godhood. Choi’s poems ask where the disparate, miscellaneous chunks of self come from, how they bind themselves into being, what fascia catches and holds them together, and could it really be another’s gaze that solidifies us into Self, after all? Could anything be so simple? And who gets to form a Self, anyway? And who is doing the gazing? 

Choi’s poems make a technology of language that takes the entropic body as its organizing principle and refuses to tidy up its chaos. Choi’s poems say this, now, and this, and this and this too. Choi’s poems push me into the cyborg body of the text, and, once I’m inside, Choi’s poems smile: It’s uncomfortable in here, isn’t it? Choi’s poems ask: What do you see of the world from inside me? Choi’s poems say: Look harder; look again.

My grandfather had a scar—a knife-white line that scored his collarbone and ended in a firework of pulpy pink near the shoulder, like a sideways exclamation mark or a comet with a fine, silky tail. Whenever I asked how he got the scar, he told me the same thing he told my mother. He got shot, he said, with a glass bullet. He never strayed from this story. None of us know what happened, really. He died when I was twelve, and the scar became ash with the rest of his body.

In a micro-essay entitled How I Wrote ‘Turing Test,’Choi writes: “It’s not an accident that English is everywhere in South Korea—in pop songs, on storefront signs, in adopted words like camera and ice cream. It’s a military project as much as it is anything else. Which means that, when asked where my poem—by extension, where my language—comes from, American imperialism is necessarily part of the answer. Like everyone, I’m more than a little Man-made.”

I put my white body with its blue passport next to Choi’s cyborg. She and I are fractured by dissimilar and similar violence. We compare our stitches and scars. Hers—we both know—wouldn’t snarl her flesh without my white body or its blue passport, not all of them, anyway, or not in the same depths, degrees, and shapes.

My grandfather with his glass bullet scar was in the Korean war just before my mother was born, just before he married her mother. He was seventeen and lied on his enlistment paperwork; he wanted to bomb Korea that badly. He wanted to go to school. He was a poor child of Italian immigrants. He loved space. The GI bill meant he would later work on the UCSD Pascal programming language and a Voyager mission to Mars. 

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,” Edward Said writes in Orientalism, “that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.” It is frighteningly easy for imperial subjects to follow this line of thinking, to repeat the easy, false, unjustifiably violent conclusion: Well, he had his reasons.

My grandfather never told me about the war. I found out after his death. I want (badly) to say that once he told me he was ashamed or made some gesture toward acknowledgement and accountability, but he didn’t; I’m just projecting my own shame. 

We’re all products of the U.S. empire here, honey, I imagine the cyborg saying, gazing back at the small animal of my projected shame. My shame-animal is a Beanie Baby of a Korean white-naped crane with a tag on its butt that says MAN-MADE IN THE U.S. My shame-animal was sold special with a tiny jar of commemorative napalm. Land of the free gift with purchase.

The cyborg chews up “the army’s alphabet,” swallows it, spits it back out as a hunk of warm-fleshed silica. The cyborg is “part machine / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist” as she steps forward. My shame-animal moves back, begins to turn, and the cyborg shakes her head. Look harder, the cyborg says, lifting her fleshy metal fingers to my shame-animal’s chin. Look again.

“now what’s so hard to believe / about that”