Scan barcode
octavia_cade's review
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
I have a much longer review of this coming out shortly in Strange Horizons, so this is basically just a short note for my own records. Breakpoint is an entertainingly curious mixture of poems, including poems on mythology and folklore, women in tech, historical events, and found code poetry (which is something I find fascinating, if not always entirely comprehensible). This initially seems a disparate mix, but the poems are tied together by culture and lived experience, and the most impressive thing to me was how small details in one piece would implicitly illuminate another, which is always a sign of careful construction, as well as a considered deliberation in deciding which poems go into a collection and which don't. I think my favourite was "Imagining Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace as Two Sides of a Quadratic Equation," and really, with a title like that, how could it not be?
More...