The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick
One of: Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022" * NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" Vulture's "10 Best Books of 2022"
A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist
From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The urgent and lyrically dynamic third collection from Choi (Soft Science) addresses intergenerational trauma and the anxieties of living in a world skating on the precipice of apocalypse. The poet is remarkably adept at capturing banal occurrences in the midst of panic, moments that are fraught with the fear of complicity: "I click purchase/ on an emergency go-bag from Amazon. When it arrives, I'll use my teeth/ to tear open the plastic, unzip the pack stitched by girls who look like me/ but for their N95s, half a judgment day away, no evacuation plan in sight." Her imagery is evocative and indelible: "Midnight, and my stomachs drag/ like nets through a river" and "Sliced from bone, my life hung like a jaw." The poem "Science Fiction Poetry" employs repetition to dizzying effect as Choi lists the myriad misfortunes of capitalism and the Anthropocene, each a possible augur of the end: "Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you want to live;/ Dystopia of billionaires racing giddy to space;/ Dystopia $800 a month but the debt stays the same." Choi's electrifying language grips the reader from the first poem and never lets go.
