Breakpoint

by Betsy Aoki

National Poetry Series Finalist and winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award, Breakpoint is a debut poetry collection dedicated to “all the women in tech making it happen.” Its author, a video game producer by day, brings the reader into her world of polygons and fractals, Japanese folklore and family stories, computational language and robot factories, and the timeless yearning to be seen clearly. The machines speak in this book, but more strongly the women’s voices rise in the rooms where the technological future is being made.

Genres: Poetry, Asian American

69 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2022

Reviews

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Breakpoint, Betsy Aoki tackles a lot of ground. She explores the multiple meanings lurking behind coding terms: encapsulation, memory, assembling language. Yōkai (ghosts and monsters in Japanese mythology) like Buruburu and Okuri Inu, and Greek mythological figures like Persephone, haunt her poems about women and men and work and relationships, about the spaces between the shiny brands of tech companies and the realities of the human workers who labor there.

The poems in Breakpoint are about identities, heritage, and the self, existing in structures that want to smudge together all our selfhoods into statistics. Aoki writes poems about being a woman game designer who everyone assumes came from marketing, who finds herself alone in a conference hall restroom, taking a respite from the constant grind of fighting to impress men who are surprised you’re even there. She writes poems about escaping abuse, and about those dreams that haunt you where you’re back in that man’s apartment. She writes about what it means to play games like Halo and Plainscape Torment when you know you’re not the target audience. And what it feels like to work on creating a game where it’s important that the female characters have “perfect breasts” when you’re finding out whether yours are cancerous.

Poetry books are not usually page-turners, but you will want to read this one in one sitting. In addition to subject matter, the poems cover a lot of ground in rhythms and sounds, patterns of stanzas and shapes on the page, which will keep you moving to the next one, to see what else this poet can do, and to get another angle of this character study, another chapter in the story.

[T.J. Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breakpoint is an all-encompassing survey of the intersection of humanity (especially gender) and technology. The poems in this collection slingshot readers from pre-technology monster killers to visceral images of internment and further still to intricate python program-poems which may require a coder’s assistance to fully understand. I asked my python-expert son and he was won over by the metaphors tucked into what at first glance appears to be merely an elegant snippet of code. This is the type of volume one should savor, like a tray of assorted tapas treats. Each one brings a distinct flavor. No two are alike. All are delectable.

[Jane Riordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is very clever poetry, written from a secure knowledge of the tech industry and so perhaps aimed at a generation much younger than mine (in my 60's). Certainly there were a number of poems within the collection where I appreciated that they were designed to read like code or referred to 'techie' things, but were just beyond my understanding and so went over my head.

But others resonated with me, those written about her family's experience of internment, her own experience of being a woman within what is, far too often in certain sectors, essentially a man's world.

Well worth a read, particularly if you are Generation Z.

[Ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my 15 years in tech, I knew that programming is an expression of creativity. I have never before seen it used as poetry before. There are actual code snippets interwoven with incisive commentary on being a woman, an Asian, and being in tech with those identities. At various times, the author tells a powerful story within just a few lines. One of my favorite lines, about being mistaken for the marketing person because of your gender, hit like a ton of bricks. Oh my gosh this is such an elegant collection of poetry.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breakpoint's poems focus on culture, tech, and gender, touching on video games, history, and mythology. I enjoyed reading it and connected most strongly to the poems exploring the disjunction between the narrator's personal experiences of self and the assumptions her mostly-male coworkers make about her and about women in general. Aoki's poetry is a good antidote to often-monolithic cultural narratives about the tech world.

[Nalanie Pecora · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I got to meet the writer and she was a very kind and thoughtful person. I loved reading her book and learning about where the poems stem from. The imagery in these poems is great and the coding poems are really fun to read as well. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes poetry!

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. The cross between technology and poetry is something that I hadn't seen done before so I loved reading something new and different. All of the poems were beautifully written!

[Erin Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

The innovative way Aoki uses her coding background to give form to this collection is remarkable. I love the edges and surprises in her exploration of identity, both as a woman in tech and as a Japanese American. Read this book!

[Nico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great perspective from a female tech leader/poet.

[Jayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating poems!

[Zoe Boggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! I loved the integration of technology and STEM into the world of poetry!

[Madison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry is absolutely fascinating and would recommend to anybody!

[Anh Dao · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry, but this time reading, I do not feel anything.

[Erica Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading Betsy Aoki’s “techno-lit” poetry collection Breakpoint, my mind kept returning to a specific quote from science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who told us that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Between its gaming lingo and automata, embedded snippets of code, and references to Silicon Valley and the Hadron Collider, it is tempting to call Breakpoint futuristic—but Aoki’s genre-bending poetry reminds us that the computing languages are tongues of the present, even if they feel like a complex and powerful magic.

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