Review of Soft Science by Franny Choi // Margaryta Golovchenko
Franny Choi’s vision of humanity is unlike anything I’ve encountered.The juxtapositions and transitions in Soft Science present the reader with a world that is slightly off-kilter; fitting, considering that it is a marvel our planet has continued to spin considering all the social and political unrest that has accumulated over the last decade. In Soft Science we see something other than straightforward condemnation or ideas for how to heal and move forward. Instead, there is a heavy sobriety, a look at the present through cracked glass that does not try to convince us to search for beauty among the wreckage. Soft Science exists in that moment of quiet between defeat and the first punch of fighting back.
Cyborgs play a prominent role in Soft Science, though they do not exist solely as markers of technological progress. The collection offers much more than merely a conventional definition of a cyborg. The speaker clarifies at the beginning of the collection:
when I say cyborg,
I mean what man made
the word for choking
on your own smell?
For Choi, cyborgs are an entry point for exploring alienation, queerness, culture, and kinship, questions left hanging and bloated with the fear and nostalgia that has characterized the last few years of the decade.
One of the epigraphs in Choi’s second collection is from theorist Donna Haraway: “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body.” Haraway rejected the posthumanist label when it was applied to works like The Cyborg Manifesto. Instead she advocated for what she calls “companion species,” referring to nonhuman entities with which humans coexist. Fittingly, Soft Science speaks to the way we continue to Other and alienate real communities, and how that alienation plays into popular culture’s vision of machines as monstrous and unnatural threats to our existence. As technology begins to feel more like a kindred spirit with each passing day, marginalized groups whose difference is incompatible with the narrative of normativity and white supremacy spun by the man in the White House assume the role of the threatening Other previously occupied by machines.
Choi invites us to consider ourselves in relation to the speaker in “Ode to Epinephrine” and partake in the pain of being asked
if you know
where you are & what day of the week it is & who is
the president of the united states. & then you have to say it.
his name. to prove everything’s normal.
I already think Soft Science requires a revisit with a fresh pair of eyes once the adrenaline has worn off from the first time. It would be a disservice to the collection to read cyborg either too literally or too allegorically, even though the speaker tells us, in “Turing Test_Love,” to:
Remember
all humans are cyborgs
all cyborgs
are sharp shards of sky
wrapped in meat.
There is a middle ground to Soft Science that exists in the gaps between the loose particles constituted by the poems themselves, in the void that the reader is confronted with head on and confronts with only the barest of lifelines. “Glossary of Terms,” the very first poem in Soft Science, is a fitting start to the collection as it exemplifies the kind of hyperawareness Choi puts the reader in with each consecutive poem, at times building upon it, as in “A Brief History of Cyborgs,” where she describes the chilling spiral downwards of “a machine girl […] wedded […] to the internet” as “the internet filled her / until she spoke swastika and garbage.”
There is a soundscape to Choi’s poems that similarly defies easy categorization. Poems like the “Turing Test” poems, as well as“Program for the Morning After” and “The Cyborg Wants to MakeSure She Heard You Right” feel like a poetic code, a kind of puzzle that the mind snaps into, the way people used to have to search for radio signals. “Chi” was a favourite of mine, partially because of how close to the character from the popular manga Cho bits it is for me. But there was also a jarring sensation, a kind of mechanical song, that formed in my mind as Choi’s gradual insertion of words like “chit” and “chip” into the wall of “chi”s began to feel like a code that came into being with each word I read.
Franny Choi’s Soft Science offers an updated definition on what it means to call something mechanical or be dehumanized. Equal parts dark humour and blunt honesty, it is one of the most complex and rewarding collections I have read in the past few years. SoftScience does not waste any time to rewrite the boundaries of genre. Instead, it breaks out of the confines of terms like sci-fi and allegory, and becomes a new kind of hybrid entity that calls for understanding and compassion rather than clinical-like deconstruction.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory,Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history at YorkUniversity and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter@Margaryta505.