“THE LENGEST NEOI” by Stephanie Choi (University of Iowa Press, 102 pages, $22).
Throughout Stephanie Choi’s “The Lengest Neoi,” names arrive and fall away in layers, reflecting myriad ways to understand the self (or to challenge, unmake or remake the self) under varying conditions, eras, contexts and motivations. Choi, who is the current poet-in-residence at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, won the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize for this inventive, ambitious debut collection.
We learn the origin of the collection’s title in an early poem, “To Error in Translation.” While traveling in India, the speaker meets a boy from Hong Kong who agrees to translate the Chinese characters of her name for her. “leng neoi is how you write it for someone learning how to speak it, the boy from Hong Kong told me, people would be able to understand. // I make her superlative — the lengest: the tongue writing herself, learning to speak.”
“The tongue writing herself, learning to speak” — this phrase could describe the thematic core of nearly every poem in the book. Language itself becomes central subject matter and opportunity for innovation. In “Trace Asymmetries,” for example, the speaker recounts extensive dental procedures, including multiple extractions. Choi skillfully removes words, leaving blanks in her speaker’s account of her mother inspecting the state of her mouth, post-extractions.
One poem offers various ways that a voicemail from the speaker’s grandmother could fall prey to mistranslation/transcription/transliteration. Another, titled “A Name That Fell From the Sky,” follows the history of her family’s name before and after a change in spelling and pronunciation during immigration to America. A series of poems, “Emails From Mom,” reveal the anxieties felt by the speaker’s mother, conveyed in warnings and pasted-in links.