What does it take to unlearn the survival instinct of trauma? What does it take to choose our tools instead of wearing down the ones...
What does it take to unlearn the survival instinct of trauma? What does it take to choose our tools instead of wearing down the ones we've been handed? In Cut to Bloom, Noah Arhm Choi attempts to forge answers to these questions by navigating the hyphen, sometimes chasm, between the Asian and American identity, between queerness and the politics of belonging, between survival and the possibility of choice.
While talking back to the colonialism of strict poetic form, this book attempts to disrupt clear definitions and redefine the American identity as one that is constructed more by questions than answers. This book celebrates the self-made, rogue bouquet, the taking of what you were given and transforming it into something you could make a gift of, and examines what needs to be pruned in order to arrive at this transformation.
Arhm Choi Wild is a Kundiman fellow from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. They were a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019 and have been published in the anthology Daring to Repair by Wising Up Press and by Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Split this Rock, and others. They have worked as an educator in New York City for the last six years, and have competed in poetry slams and performed across the country, including at Brave New Voices, the New York City Poetry Festival, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and the Bowery Poetry Club.
