Tebot Bach | 2022 | 64 pages
Betsy Aoki’s debut poetry book Breakpoint immerses us in the structure and design of computer code—the play and poetics of its language and script, the contours of the game and the complexities of its creator. Winner of the 2021 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Breakpoint is constructed with the patterns of game coding interspersed with personal poems about the poet herself—a woman in a male-dominated profession, where every “girl gamer” (“[e]ach command like whistling”) is also a “girl fighting” (“the heel of her shoe to his face”), a “girl leaping” (“There is no new world without a girl leaping”).
Punctuating the collection are seven found poems pulled from code that Aoki wrote in the Python computer language. The opening found poem starts “229 def collide (self,other_object):” and finishes “236 return True / 237 else: / 238 return False.” Aoki focuses her collection on the collisions between binaries in the world we live in, occupy, build, encode: the self or other, material or virtual, organic or artificial, verified or imagined, visceral or programmed, girl or man, known or dangerous, friend or foe.
Early in the collection, Aoki infuses her personal poems with Japanese history, language, and lore: the Topaz internment camp, one hundred ways to say “you” in Japanese, the Okuri Inu (a “sending-off dog demon”). Ambiguous spirits of Japanese legend appear as well—the Buruburu, Tenjo Kudari, Yokai. Placed alongside the poems about game building, these figures establish themes that mark the dangers of the game: of chasing and hunting, of being chased and hunted, of being watched, vulnerable, preyed upon, of evading, escaping, overcoming, surviving.
Multiple scenarios of this tension play out in Aoki’s chosen profession and inherited world, where she imagines herself an “aviatrix / to Mars.” Fear and isolation mark “Standing in the Xbox building parking lot”, where “She is standing / in the building’s parking lot wondering / if she has breast cancer and if so, / how to tell him, the boss.” This is the same girl coder in “girl camo” who “hearing the terror… will go back to the war… where walls of people code and collide… where there is no such thing as a perfect shadow / perfect water, or perfect tears. Just perfect breasts.” In contrast to self-conscious uncertainty, the poem that immediately follows, “Do I look like I code?”, brings challenge, even bravado, with the closing declaration, “Whatever you held in that space I erase.”
However, Aoki is not simply describing a game as though she’s struggling inside it. As a creator, she’s outside it, too, writing the code that brings its narrative to life. In coding, a breakpoint is a deliberate pausing—an interruption—in programming in order to debug. The programmer inspects lines, gathers information, interjects instruction. Throughout Breakpoint, we encounter a dialectic among clichés, their erasure, their re-coding. The collection is marked by reconnaissance and furious revision. In “Slouching like a velvet rope,” winner of the 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, Aoki writes, “Yesterday my name was power / adaptor, toaster jockey, tag spinner. / Today it’s anger and liquid mercury, evading reach. / Tomorrow I’ll be breaking the rules by showing up / … no one noticed that my name isn’t that girl / And I didn’t come here from marketing, I flew in / full frontal from engineering.”
The game on, it can turn—and it does. Near the end of the collection, we meet “The Sketcher, the Witcher”—a confident hunter and protector:
She has a silver sword she’s not afraid to use. And a black crow feather
tucked behind her white, white hair. And a potion flask of the blackest
ink. Some say it was sorcery, that turned a young woman’s hair white
before her time. When asked what she does, in every bar from here to
elvish country, she says: I kill monsters.
The Witcher wields desire as well as power—she remakes herself, leaping, reimagined, in this new world. “Every time she beds a man in town, she draws his picture, while he’s sleeping… When she leaves, she pastes them to the inside of a place other women will see.” When the coder girl in “Border lands” “hit[s] the return key”, she does so “hard.” Or in “The mystery, explained,” “Each hard-won / hard-on inside the computer” is “tested, tested”—her lover “surprised how the bed rocks like a ship” because there’s “No gravity for this girl.” The found poem “180 #Accelerando” drives the point home: “181 def set_thrust (self, on):”
“Imagining Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace as Two Sides of a Quadratic Equation” illustrates the way in which innovation is an energy, generative, fueled by and fueling desire, but more than pleasure, different from power:
Meanwhile, he is a head full of storm, leaf and feathers.
His engine is eating him and it will never finish.
He stares into the numbers the way she does, like a cat,
While ears perk up like a fox’s, sure of the hunt ahead
And the hounds behind…
He could look at her all day of course.
He could think equations with her all night.
In this energy we find life and its equations. Ultimately, the game is life in the face of death. Sometimes Aoki’s code won’t run—she’s left tossing missives into the “indescribable,” the unrecoverable. Is memory—hers, ours—living, or something else, something closer to AI? Would it “pass the Turing test in triplicate”? In “Messaging the dead”, Aoki explains, “The dead / always miss me, but I am just another cursor / … We cannot touch. / We think we understand. We type and type / worried to find that each has been talking / like the skim of a Ouija board’s glide / only to our own twitches and fears.”
But this coder girl doesn’t let the yet-unanswered stop her. Like “all the women in tech making it happen” to whom the book is dedicated, she flags the breakpoint, looks for bugs, moves on and through. In the poem that names the collection, Aoki writes the breakpoint is “[w]here we stop and all check our backpacks, making sure we have enough water. It’s a long climb up before we can run.” The collection closes with a Python found poem: “update(self): / # update angle / self.angle + = self.angle_vel.” Writing the code, making the self, living the life: the updates go on.
Breakpoint invites all of us to the hunt for clarity and meaning. Aoki invites us to leap, pause, and then run, to “whistle our lives defiantly into the rushing dark.” And we don’t need to know a line of code to appreciate the thrill of her game.
Read Betsy Aoki’s Letter to America poem, “Dear America,” appearing in Terrain.org.
Kristin Van Tassel teaches writing and American literature at Bethany College in central Kansas. She writes essays, poetry, and book reviews for literary and academic publications, including ISLE, The Journal of Ecocriticism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Wraparound South, Wanderlust, The Land Report, About Place, and Ecotone.
Header photo by Vintage Tone, courtesy Shutterstock.
