Serena Chopra

This Human Serena Chopra

Poetry. At once explosive lyric and feminist ontology, Serena Chopra's THIS HUMAN is unafraid to ask ancient and fundamental questions: What is beauty? What is the human? What is the relationship between the desiring body and the reasoning mind? In this challenging and eruptive work, the human is a 'gaping hum, ' who'conspires against herself' in her loneliness. She is also a compassionate body, a 'relentless language, ' 'attempting knowledge, ' 'forgiving the world.' If in the 21st century epic there is 'no pattern, only locations and dislocations, ' and if poetry is now not consolation but a means to measure doubt and desire, then Chopra's book is gorgeously current, a 'singular and violent arrangement' in which language 'pains itself into poetry.'--Julie Carr

What is anatomy but compassion? In THIS HUMAN, Serena Chopra asks us to consider the body divorced from its environs & struggling to adapt, aching for a tongue-and-groove fit, our not-so-silent partner in fathoming. Its softness announces us. It's the home we fi rst trash and others readily trash for us, particularly in its female forms. We can't grow into the model that now stands for beauty, nor can we root down into the old earth. So, to what exactly are we tethered? Despite abounding with organs & organisms, Chopra's speaker is lonely, emptyish. She knows we are too, and offers up her spaces for our echoes to enter, for the construction of startling new architectures. She is generous with us and with the lyric. 'What we see is the broad, red cavern behind our breasts. Here, sorrow grows like fungi along a brazen system of roots from which I can recall no source.'--Danielle Pafunda

In a single lifetime, your body will undergo trillions and trillions of cell divisions. In other words, you are always doomed to be an other, to be elsewhere, to be in absentia from yourself. This is the problem with words: the warp and woof of their threading together the world and the way we experience it falls forever short. Here, Serena Chopra has gifted us with a book that reconceptualizes this falling as something wholly potent, primal, and bound to give pause. Call it 'a comma hanging in the womb of some watery language.' She does! Chopra is our flâneur of interiority, and THIS HUMAN 'elucidates the meat of form'--Noah Eli Gordon