Chanlee Luu’s The Machine Autocorrects Code to I is an ambitious new entry into a larger field of feminist Asian American speculative poetics. This includes Margaret Rhee’s Love Robot (2017)—which placed third in the 2018 Elgin Award for Best Full-Length Book—Franny Choi’s Death by Sex Machine (2017) and Soft Science (2019), and Lo Kwa Mei-en’s (also publishing fiction as Lois Mei-en Kwa) The Bees Make Money in the Lion (2016). Like these books, The Machine Autocorrects Code to I reflects on a feminized and racialized experience to critique discourses of alienness and (techno)Orientalism. The poems balance between formal experimentation and lyric presence, engaging both aspects in the service of the project of producing poetic understanding.
The poems are deeply concerned with the interplay of language, and are both multilingual and imaginative. “Sister Cities (Thành Phố Chị Em)” uses, if I have counted correctly, nine languages to encounter its multicultural milieu. Structured around the real sister cities of Roanoke, VA, where Luu currently lives, the poem speaks of their parents, loneliness, and pink to a “you” assumed to be the speaker’s sister. In the language of each city, these stud the poem, though first introduced in the narrative in Vietnamese. On the page, down the left are the cities, down the center pink, and down the right is the narrative itself. The divided, multilingual structure of the poem echoes the division and cultural interchange that characterizes its events: “The place we decided to settle / in has seven Sister Cities. We only have each other. / I watched more Korean dramas with our parents” (p. 21, excerpting only from the right column). The typical reader of the poem is unlikely to speak every language in it, ranging as they do across the world, but to speak some is not, perhaps, that unlikely. By presenting Korean in hangul, Russian in Cyrillic, and Chinese in what I believe are simplified characters alongside romanizations, however, Luu insists on the structural sovereignty of non-Anglophone discourses even as she writes a poem in English. The reader is reminded that if they do not understand then that is, ultimately, their problem, not the fault of the linguistic other.
Since Asian Americans, in particular, are often cast as non-native or otherwise flawed speakers of English regardless of their actual English proficiency—for more on this and its effects on literature, see Dorothy Wang’s Thinking Its Presence (2014)—Luu produces a searing reminder of the danger of uncritically accepting the dominance of English. In “Sister Cities (Thành Phố Chị Em)” and other poems in the collection, Luu’s multilingual and multicultural Vietnamese-Chinese American experience is allowed to be the unmarked state of being, rather than a deviation from a monolingual Anglophone norm. Multilingual being is simply the condition of existence. Even as the primary language of the collection is English, other languages are afforded equal power and authority, resisting the linguistic racism that paints Asian languages and Asian individuals as incomprehensibly other, and placing African, European, and Asian languages on equal footing.
Also central to the operation of the book is its formal play. These poems range across both original/experimental/innovative forms and received/traditional forms, including hybrids between the two. “The IPCC Is Virtually Certain, But Not Everybody Is” combines a rondel—a form adapted from fourteenth-century French lyric, and related to the more common rondeau—with footnotes, a move that evokes a variety of modernist and contemporary experimental poetics including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923) and Tyrone Williams’s “Cold Calls” (2002). In this poem about climate change, the footnotes allow Luu to make the most of the received form’s repetition and traditionalism in the service of breaking away from the cultural and economic norms that got us here. “Justice for the Form(ula): A Xia Sestina” similarly crosses cultures and structures, blending European form with Chinese contexts to reach its summation: “Precision is key. I read jaded scripture & slash a new cut / of wisdom. I melt bitter pomelo rind into sweet syrup. I adapt my flesh / into a skin I grow with. Power is just a word. Why do so many foolishly bend?” (p. 71). These closing three lines stretch and pull, imagining a resistance to the coercive force of contemporary America as much as a rethinking of the dynastic, allowing the poem’s ever-increasing expansion of the verse line to push at the boundaries of the highly restrictive, repetitive, even obsessive, sestina form.
On the other end, among the most experimental poems, my favorites for sheer effectiveness of innovative form were “CHE 101: Material and Energy Balances” and “N/A.” Both of these poems deploy their forms to concern themselves with the educational and bureaucratic settings that structure so much of contemporary life, especially for immigrants and racialized subjects, reminding me of Myung Mi Kim’s account of the same in a Korean-American context from Dura (1998), especially “Hummingbird”—which begins with a translation exam. “CHE 101: Material and Energy Balances” takes the form of a written test or a page of notes, placing a hard box around the text which otherwise resembles simple justified prose. Opening by situating itself—“The first lesson in chemical engineering is: how to draw a box. 1. Start with your writing utensil: crumbling calcium carbonite” (p. 63)—the poem immediately enters the space of the classroom and all its limitations, situating the process of learning within the confines that both limit and enable it. The poem then grows and shifts, constantly using the scientific precision summoned by the identification of the pencil with “crumbling calcium carbonite” to press against the box, to press against the scientistic assumption that scientific knowledge is all there is. In so doing, the poem and its knowledge are always threatening to escape the confines into which they have been placed, confines represented structurally by the visible box around the text.
The poem’s end finally blows that out to the realm of the political and social: “You wanted objectivity—right and wrong are easy to discern. A square is a rectangle, but the opposite is not true. They are afraid of aliens. You become a shapeshifter. Singularity will kill the human species, the movies say. You do not know this yet. It’s only the first day. You do not have an eraser” (p. 63). The shifts between “you” and “they” here serve as a reminder of both the appeal and the imperfection of the rigid, ultimately ending with the simultaneous assertion of possibility and unretractability. Objectivity, though initially desirable, is immediately complicated by the realization that “is” is not necessarily reciprocal, that there are multiple meanings of even a simple assertion that something is the case. “They are afraid of aliens,” and perhaps that means “they” are afraid of space aliens or perhaps it means something more sinister. Either way, “you become a shapeshifter” undermines the certainty you seemed to be looking for in order to resist that fear. Singularity is the subject of the next sentence, but it is also a monolith, a singular culture that “they” may be trying to maintain. In the end, this is a beginning. Anything can happen. What happens will not un-happen. The reader is called upon to align themselves with the “you” and participate in the indelible and ever-shifting future that might be able to escape singularity and objectivity.
“N/A,” on the other hand, starts out by sprawling. Even the large line that divides the two sections at the top of the page, like a government form, feels partial, incomplete, feeble against the words’ movement across the page, the echoing proliferation of “n” and “a” that never settles on a stable and process-halting “not applicable.” Instead, the poem opens with “new application” and ranges broadly through the bureaucratic life of the present, offering varied solutions for the acronym: “no answer,” “noted ambiguity,” and “nonresident alien”; a reminder of US imperial violence in “napalm afternoons”; visions of possibility in the form of “nacreous architecture” (p. 53). Partaking of multiple forms, exploring sprawling relationality with punctuation and spatial arrangement, “N/A” critiques the systems of the world in which we live. These systems are not, Luu sees, designed to help those subject to them, and so must be broken even as they are lived within, as “N/A” is both a form and makes impossible the belief in the reality of forms.
Not unusually for this strand of poetics, Luu’s book uses its engagement with the speculative to critique the discourses of alienness, especially as they apply to Asian Americans—to criticize racist assumptions, such as those held by students we meet in “The Joke About the Orange.” But I think even more here, at the heart of the book, is the sense of wonder that is permitted by speculative fiction. Take, for example, “Cruel Summer (2022),” which begins with the impossible: “Boy walks on air. He bends the laws of physics like the laws that govern US bow to him. The waves: radial” (p. 43). This is not exactly an endorsement, but the speaker is seeing something, awed not by what is happening but by her own capacity for sight. After all, in folktales the true wonder is not the presence of fairies but the ability of the hero to see and potentially outmatch them. Always, these poems are concerned with possibility, with a chance to embrace the future and marvel at its presence, the hushed breath at realizing that the landscape of a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter is not all dead after all. In “A Confused and Displaced Eve Writes a Ghazal,” we are reminded that “joy” is something one can “wield” (p. 68)—and it is this that I think makes The Machine Autocorrects Code to I of particular interest to SFF readers.
Unlike some of the titles I mentioned at the beginning—titles that share many of this text’s themes and interests—this book seems, in a fairly clear way, to be as much in dialogue with realism as with the fantastic, even as the poems invoke robots, sirens, far-future post-nuclear ecosystems, rocket ships, and more. Yet they never abandon the sense that what they are capturing is a brand-new, never-before-seen world. Luu is writing neither confessionalism nor realism because, as the poems of The Machine Autocorrects Code to I declare, “reality” is a fantastical landscape as fragile and ripe for discovery as Faerie or any alien planet. And, Luu suggests, with a sense of that wonder, perhaps the real can be reshaped, reframed, and remade—not towards utopian flawlessness but towards genuine regeneration.