Franny Choi
“Poetry helps me to have a conversation with history. It’s hard for me to understand the past as a series of events. Poetry allows me to understand history by embodying it from my own subjective position and to track the ways that those imprints of the past show up in my sentences.”
“In their arresting poetry collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi considers the many ways in which the unthinkable has already happened for the most marginalized around the world by way of catastrophe, war, and devastation.’”
“Franny Choi’s generous inventiveness transmutes the book’s violent lore into a ferocious tenderness. In its conceptual heft, formal virtuosity, queer imagination, multi-dexterous approach to language, and tonal intricacy, Soft Science is a crucial book for our time—perhaps the book for our time.”
“. . . Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology.”
“Franny Choi’s Soft Science (2019) is shaped by a sequence of poems that structurally enact the assembling of a cyborg’s mind and body… how can one prove their own humanity, for what possible reason should one need to affirm their humanity, and who feels holy enough to ask for that affirmation.”
“Franny is an incredible innovator, constantly pushing what the forms of poetry and language can do. The book examines the very idea of softness, of what it means to be human in an increasingly inhumane world.”
Franny Choi is a poet and essayist. They are the author of the essay collection We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg (forthcoming from Ecco in October 2026) and three collections of poetry, including The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022) and Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019). They also co-edited the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books, 2024), and their work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge, a project that builds connections between writers and social justice movements. Their gayest honor to date is "Former Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Open and right-click to download
(c) Tarik Bartel
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
