The lengest neoi

Stephanie Choi

Book - 2024

"The Lengest Neoi embraces and complicates what it means to err-to wander or go astray; a deviation from a code of behavior or truth; a mistake, flaw, or defect. Beginning with the collection's title, which combines a colloquial Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi/'Pretty Girl') and the English suffix for the superlative degree (-est), these poems wander, deviate, and flaw across bodies, geographies, and languages. From the Nantucket Whaling Museum to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, from childhood speech and bodily correction to the history of the American Chestnut Tree and anti-Asian sentiment and policies, from voicemails to experimental translations between English and Cantonese-this book asks: to wander or go astray from ...where? Who and what defines error? What is a right translation? Of language, of body, of self, of history? The speaker's insatiable desire for self-definition-to transform 'error' into poetic space and play-leaves her wondering if the process of creating and looking doesn't also embody a kind of projected, and potentially problematic, fantasy of self. Ultimately, the collection grapples with how one might be 'still of the histories that define me,' and able to locate sites of agency and self-creation. In this debut collection from Stephanie Choi, you'll find the poet's 'tongue writing herself, learning to speak'"-- more