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Poetry! Let's read some :)

I don't know if this will need spoiler tags, I'm guessing maybe not? If we feel like we need them, we'll use them.

I can start anytime, I had planned on reading this next week, a little every day. I'll start on Monday.

There are two different blurbs. ŷ������:

Soft Science 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.

Scribd:

Loosely inspired by the movie Ex Machina* and the character Kyoko (view spoiler)[ (an Asian sex robot whose creator removes her language capabilities in order to protect his company's trade secrets) (hide spoiler)]. It's a take on language, race, and gender; about survival under capitalism; about power and intimacy, especially with others whose bodies make them strange. Though the book isn't just about robots (or just about that movie), Kyoko is "one of the godmothers of the book," and haunts it throughout.

*

Poetry buddies!

(I don't know if I feel like I'm part of the poetry gang yet, but hopefully after reading this I will be!)

The cover is gorgeous, it's what caught my eye, and then I read the blurb, and then it was on my TBR :)

There's a different blurb on Scribd, I added it to the starting post. It says this collection is inspired by Ex Machina, so I'll watch that over the weekend. I don't think you need to, but I have it on HBO, so might as well. I have seen it before, but don't remember it well enough.

Yay!!

I’m in!

Woot! 😊

I've read the blurb. That counts as having taken part in the Buddy Read, right?

It's step one, the next step is to read the rest!

You ask too much of me!

Stories of my life and others

I will start this tomorrow, I had zero reading time today :(

I’ll start today, too. I want to finish the Sarah Piatt book before starting this one and that should happen today.

Well I think I might be more nervous and confused now that I've read a couple of these?

The format does force me to slow down and actually think about what I read, which is good. It's also making me sort of intuitively feel my interpretation of what's going on, not so much undertand it logically. But it feels very stream of consciousness without a lot to grab onto.

I think I like it, though?

I keep going back to "Glossary of Terms", finding new things to ponder about. I like this, I don't normally flip back and forth between the story and the glossary, so doing it now when it's not an actual glossary is both amusing and kind of feels like it's deliberate :)

Inonoy managed the first poem today and I think I want to give it a second read tomorrow to jot down some thoughts.

I think intuitively approaching poems is a good strategy! Abd going back and forth between the gl8ssary and the poems sounds great. I need to start doing that once I get deeper into this book.

I also like to remind myself that I don't have to understand everything in a poem- especially for poems I read just for myself and not for work and not on the first reading.

Besides Glossary my favorites so far are the Turing Test ones and the one formatted like code (”Program for the Morning After��). All of them have visually obvious layers/levels, and I enjoyed looking at all the different options and combining them in interesting ways.

Also ”The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right��, what a cool idea and even in this form, all too easy to ’translate�� back into the original comments.

Okay, so, dome thoughts on the "Turing Test" poem: (view spoiler)[I read this mostly as using the Turing Test and the trope of the robot who has to prove having a consciousness as an extended metaphir for how women, people of color, essentially everyone considered "Other" have to prove they're being fully human. I mostly got to tgat cause of lines like

we stayed up / practicing / girl / girl / girl /
until our guns softened / yes / i can speak / your language i broke
that horse myself

and thewhole part about "man [...] move[ing] toward what you know / you are not / animal, monster, alien, bitch" (hide spoiler)]

I really like the format of that poem and how the slashes work like punctuation/to create emphases.


I also really like "Acknowledgments".

I have the ebook. I actually, for the first time in my life, switched to reading on a computer screen. I like seeing the entire poem in front of me, especially for the ones I mentioned before, with an unusual format/layout.

I also like the slashes in the Turing Test poems, I plan on going back after I finish the whole thing to only read those parts. I don't think that's the intended way to engage with these, but I'm really enjoying playing around with the format.

I can see these immediately obvious layers/levels to Turing Test:

- the different Turing Test poems throughout the collection and their titles
- the "subtitles" with the slashes within each poem
- each section between the slashes
- the subtitles/slashes across the entire collection
- etc. etc. with infite ways to mix and match

It's like the entire collection is written like a program, so that you can call on the subroutine you need/want at the moment :)

LOL Anna! You would like that.

Haha, I was waiting for someone to comment on that :P

Anna wrote: "I have the ebook. I actually, for the first time in my life, switched to reading on a computer screen. I like seeing the entire poem in front of me, especially for the ones I mentioned before, with..."

Oh yeah! That comparison to a program makes sense!
Also, I think with poems like these, which are quite experimental in their form, there's no "wrong" approach to reading them.

I hope I'll be a little less tired tonight so that I can make more progress.

Mareike wrote: "Also, I think with poems like these, which are quite experimental in their form, there's no "wrong" approach to reading them."

I do understand that, it just feels like I'm engaging more with the format than the content. Not that I don't find the content interesting! The format is so unique that it fascinates me and pulls my attention away from the main attraction.

I have read the Glossary and the first Turing poem, which I found interesting. I’ve been too tired and drawn more to A Song for a New Day than to poetry.

I just read “A Brief History of Cyborgs�� and I love the repetitions from “Turing Test�� and the allusions back to it.

Mareike wrote: "I just read “A Brief History of Cyborgs��"

I highlighted a (partial) quote from it:

"I watched lights move across a screen, and for a moment, forgot the names of my rotting parts."

Oh yeah, that’s a really poignant line!

I also really liked this bit:

“The scientist called me hard, and I softened my smile. The scientist
called me
soft, and I broke sentences to prove him wrong and what and what
did I prove
then did I��

It made me think of the

�� your language i broke
that horse myself��

line in “Turing Test��.

The title "I Swiped Right on the Borg" XD

This line from Turing Test_Weight:

(view spoiler)[ "inside each question lies another question" (hide spoiler)]

pretty much sums up how I feel about this collection. I continued enjoying the Turing Test parts the most, even though there are some brilliant lines in several poems. I highlighted lots, but they're mostly little things that spoke to me personally, and not necessarily things I want to pick apart in public. Examining your own consciousness (and awareness of certain things) while reading about AI and code is always fun :) And the nestedness (is that a word?) of the whole thing, not just the parts I talked before, really shone for me.

(I even got some tips for working with humans from Turing Test_Love!)

Oh and also, going back to the beginning, from Turing Test:

"this is a test to determine if you have consciousness"

is a great way to start a collection like this!

Anna wrote: "The title "I Swiped Right on the Borg" XD
..."

Ha! I look forward to getting to that poem.

One thing I love about poetry (in general but also in this collection) is its capacity to speak to people on a very individual level.

I just read "Perchance to Dream" and that title is an A+ Hamlet reference. And the last two lines really stood out to me.

"Jaebal" really struck a chord wirh me. I'll need to sit wirh that one for a bit.

I really liked "Turing Test_Weight". And "Introduction to Quantum Weight" is probably my favorite in this collection. Though that might be bias because I already knew it.

I forgot to copy my highlights before my copy returned :( I don't have it anymore.

Oh no :(