Franny Choi’s collection investigates the blurred boundary between organic consciousness and artificial intelligence through a series of poems modeled on the Turing Test. Drawing on the trope of the cyborg, the book examines how queer identity and Asian American femininity are filtered through digital interfaces and historical violence. The language moves between computer code, glitches, and anatomical descriptions to dissect how trauma and desire function within a mechanical framework. Choi uses these persona poems to question how a marginalized body maintains its humanity when society treats it as a programmable object.
Readers of contemporary poetry and speculative fiction will find this collection useful for its technical formal experimentation. Those interested in the intersection of linguistics and technology can analyze how Choi manipulates syntax to mimic machine learning. The book offers a framework for understanding how language shapes personhood in an increasingly automated world. A reader finishes these poems with a sharper perspective on how surveillance and data categorization impact personal intimacy, leaving them with an anatomical view of the labor required to exist as a feeling entity in a digital age.
- Published
- 2019
- Language
- EN
