Franny Choi read her free-form, long breath of a poem “Ode to Epinephrine” in Portland at AWP 2019. Out of all the readings I attended, her sketches of the heartbeat-to-heartbeat moments she felt during an allergic reaction and the ensuing adrenaline-assisted rush really stuck. The poem’s phrase “kool-aid man into the room when the blood’s turned up too high,” carried an undercurrent of oh yeah, an unspoken joke that was nevertheless present. Then, on the subject of jokes, “it maybe is too many jokes when you doctor looks at you like a mistake, when the nurse brings a sad banana” also hit home. The whole thing reminded me of Henry Ford Hospital, in Detroit, where I went once or twice due to bike accidents or paid medical studies.

Since Franny Choi is a current Zell Postgraduate Fellow at University of Michigan, I want to ask her, “Is this about Henry Ford Hospital?” There’s something so familiar about the way the nurses in her poems act, like when the subject of Choi’s poem is forgiven for rambling and sent home a little too soon. But it isn’t important if this happened at the same hospital. The experience would be the same to anyone dealing with a medical emergency. What’s really happening is that Choi’s new poetry collection Soft Science, despite its ultra-specific premise, is extremely relatable to whoever’s reading it.

The core of Soft Science is the imagined experience of machines in relation to the experiences of queer, Asian American women. Through references to Turing tests (which scientist Alan Turing used to test for artificial intelligence in machines) and the experiences of Kyoko (a mute robot in the 2014 film Ex Machina) and Chi (an android found in the trash at the beginning of the manga Chobits), Choi sketches a bold, relatable argument. The idea of having your humanity and personhood questioned, even as someone tries to fuck you, can be hard to look at—but for many, it’s all too identifiable.

Choi’s poems say things that couldn’t be uttered as successfully in any other art form. They simultaneously push language and society forward, a directive many contemporary poems neglect. When I look to poems, I’m interested in their ideas as well as their wordplay, and Choi’s pieces have plenty of both.