We Radiant Things

PREORDER — Expected release: 02 February 2027. This book is not yet available. Dispatch is subject to supplier availability and publication-date changes.

"We Radiant Things is criticism at its most intimate and alive. I am grateful for this book.”—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor FeelingsBlending lyric memoir and cultural criticism, acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection explores our obsession with cyborgs and what sci-fi representations of Asian femmes reveal about race, gender, sexuality, disability, labor, technology, and language.In the 2014 film Ex-Machina, a Japanese maid named Kyoko—beautiful, obedient, unspeaking—peels back the skin on her face to reveal glimmering circuitry. The white man who has been trying to understand her inscrutable behavior looks on in horror. When Franny Choi first watches this scene, their own face awash in the screen’s eerie glow, they feel a familiar mix of revulsion and self-recognition. Yes, Choi thinks, that’s what I’ve been trying to say.In this luminous essay collection, Choi descends into the uncanny valley to encounter notable cyborgs and robots from across American culture and asks why so many of them bear the faces of East Asian women. Just why is it that whenever artificial intelligence is represented, a sexy but unfeeling Asian woman enters the frame What does the literal objectification of Asian femmes say about how the West imagines—and dreads—an increasingly automated futureChoi draws from their own experiences along with queer, feminist, and critical race theory to answer these questions. Refusing the detached safety of critical distance, they write instead “at stabbing range”—a risky intimacy that collapses the space between human and machine, critic and subject. We Radiant Things draws closer to the images carved out for us, the histories of oppression that animate them, and the future in which we try, painfully, to find ourselves.

About the author

Franny Choi is the author of two previous poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), as well as one chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a recipient of Princeton University's Holmes National Poetry Prize, and a graduate of the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers Program. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and their cat.