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Salvage
Hedgie Choi
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Series Editors
Ronald Wallace, Founding Series Editor
“Choi’s Salvage transverses a landscape that is entirely her own, a landscape full of friends, mythological characters, and animals of unknown size. God is there, too, though it is unclear whether this is the god of people, the god of horses, or the god of polar bears. It is a book of vast subjects and vast feeling, filled with an ecstatic strangeness that has been neglected in American poetry for far too long.”
—Jackson Holbert
But we are not in the end yet
Part blasphemous prayer, part stand-up comedy, wholly unique, this breathtaking collection is by turns devastating, funny, and startling. “Some things happened to me in my formative years that I don’t want to tell you about,” writes Hedgie Choi, “but some things happened to you too.”
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?
“Not so scary now
that science has discovered
your feathers”
—Excerpt from “Tyrannosaur”
Hedgie Choi is the translator of Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young and the cotranslator of Hysteria by Kim Yideum, which won the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. Her poetry can be found in Poetry, Catapult, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her fiction can be found in NOON, American Short Fiction, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere.
Praise
“Meet Hedgie Choi, in Salvage, lurking like someone with blue hair, using droll commentary and humor to confront poetry’s great subjects—love, death, and mystery: ‘I am afraid of mystery / but by Mystery I was made / to be afraid.’ These poems thrill with deceptive simplicity, subversion, and candor, jolted by biting critiques of culture, in a tone as accessible as it is original. She writes, for example, with a wink and a nod, ‘I’m too afraid of pain to eat Chinese food / under five dollars. I’m going to live forever.’ I hope she does.”
—Jane Miller
“Now that this book is out, I do worry about my life. How will I do dishes? Bathe? Sleep? When instead I can read Salvage. And you’re thinking, ugh, another hyperbolic blurb. But the joke is on you. I am literally going to lose my job for my refusal to do anything besides read these poems. And it scares me. Haha no no, stop, I am not scared. I am in the company of my favorite poems. How could I be scared?”
—Chessy Normile
Table of Contents
Salvage
. . .
Laying Down the Groundwork
Mutualism
Freaking Out
Equal and Opposite
Party Time
Never Mind
The Listening Section
Brutal Honesty
Nourished and Enriched
Tyrannosaur
Affirmations
Phases
. . .
Holiday
The Happy Middle
In Some Ways I Have Changed
In My Natural Habitat
Transformation
What’s Up Buttercup
Orchestrated Intent
Practice
Epimetheus at the Tattoo Parlor
. . .
Prometheus to His Liver Growing Overnight
When Someone Says a Place on Stage and Only a Handful of People in the Audience Emit an Uncertain WOOOOOOO
Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Have a Nice Day
Temptation
Martha’s Vineyard
In That Life
Close Friends
Epic
Botched Corinthians, Retconned Corinthians
Testimony
. . .
Tenderly
For Seeing in the Dark
Horror Minus Terror
Volunteering
Vespertine Is the Name of a Restaurant in LA with an 18-Plus-Course Tasting Menu
Child of God
Poem for Jackson
What about Hell Then
When I Wake up from a Bad Dream I Am Ravenous
Ichor, Meaning the Fluid That Flows like Blood in the Veins of Gods, as in Greek Mythology, or, a Watery Discharge from a Wound
Lessons
. . .
Archetype
Summer in Austin, TX
Manners
Plagiarism
New Year’s Eve
Last Night
Will You Disabuse Me
Still
. . .
Acknowledgments
Notes
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