In the last couple of classes we have been trying to tease out what it means when Choi interweaves poems about technology and cyborgs with ones coming from a more human narrator. I think that the two quotes in the beginning of the book kind of relate to that– the first quote reads “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body” by Donna Haraway. The quote underneath that reads “The rain is soft. The rain is hard. I don’t know anything” by Bhanu Kapil. To me, the first quote seems more meta and scientific and it sounds like something directly out of a feminist theory textbook. This political quote is then juxtaposed to the second quote by Kapil which sounds softer and more humanizing to me. I feel like these two quotes set up the rest of the book, where there will be poems that directly critique gender roles and societal norms with others that are more obscure in their meaning.
Quotes in Beginning