Four Poets on Trauma, Tenderness, and Survival

Franny Choi is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science ( 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (2014), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (2017). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective.  

Soft Science (Alice James Books) explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness ―how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness. Publishers Weekly noted that ". Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology." 

A New York Times best-selling author, Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed poet and cultural critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, MTV News, and other outlets. He is the author of the highly praised poetry collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much and the essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. He is currently at work on They Don't Dance No Mo', a history of black performance in the United States. He is the author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press), the New York Times calls it, "Warm, immediate and intensely personal." Abdurraqib traces the seminal rap group’s creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs.

Ladan Osman, Somali-born poet and essayist, is the author of The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize, and the chapbook Ordinary Heaven, which appeared in the box set Seven New Generation African Poets. Her latest collection, Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press) looks at the origin story of Adam, Eve, and their exile from the Garden of Eden, exploring displacement and alienation from its mythological origins to the present. In this formally experimental collection steeped in Somali narrative tradition, Osman gives voice to the experiences and traumas of displaced people over multiple generations. The characters in these poems encounter exile’s strangeness while processing the profoundly isolating experience of knowing that once you are sent out of Eden, you can’t go back.

Staceyann Chin is a poet, actor, performing artist and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Other Side of Paradise. She is also the cowriter and original performer in the Tony Award–winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and author of the one-woman shows Hands Afire, Unspeakable Things, Border/Clash, and MotherStruck. Her poetry been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Crossfire (Haymarket Books) offers more than 50 of Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book. The collection includes verses about the intersection of love, sex, race, gender, trauma, queerness, motherhood, and oppression and offers reflections from the #MeToo movement to 9/11. According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”