Salvage

Whether the site of exploration is Star Trek, Leonard Cohen, roadkill, or etymology, sublime bewilderment rubs shoulders with half-buried humiliations and accidental salvations. The voice in these poems tenderly and tenaciously inquires into how to survive--not how to survive violence but how to survive surviving. Choi is the rare poet who can elicit laughter, sober reflection, and wry bemusement all within the space of a few lines--or sometimes only one.

This is a collection that you can read through in a single sitting, then return to again and again. "I'm half teenage girls / and half grown men," she writes--to which we can only wonder, aren't we all?