The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

Named A Most Anticipated Book LitHub * Vulture * Time * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick

One 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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary, Adult

142 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2022

About the author

Franny Choi is a poet, performer, editor, and playwright. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the Poetry Foundation's podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, was released from Alice James Books in April 2018. A current Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, she is currently based near Detroit, Michigan.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.’

The apocalypse of the present has become ‘so loud we finally stopped hearing it,’ warns poet and activist Franny Choi in her third collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. A hard hitting collection that centers on concepts of endings, Choi blissfully incorporates the aesthetics of science fiction into her poetry, crafting landscapes of the now as dystopian wastelands that make this read with a rather epic sense of urgency. ‘Grief's a heavy planet’ and Choi takes us through the horrors of the past and present and asks us what the future will hold. There are difficult questions poetically posed, moving between global scales wondering if it is already ‘too late for the earth / to yield anything but more corpses,’ to more personal examinations of identity such as when she asks ‘am I the colonization or the reparations? (she adds later ‘I choose to be the reparations’). The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a powerful collection of socio-political criticisms, and examinations of history and cultural identity that delivers lines that will knock you right over and others that will tug your heartstrings with such an urgency that you cannot, and should not, look away.

‘Sliced from bone, my life
Hung like a jaw—faultless. And
Unforgivable.’

The weight of history hangs heavy in each of these poems, moving across atrocities of war—such as the dropping of the atomic bombs which figure into several poems—mass refugee and immigration movements, and even into the present with poems addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. While the amalgamation of traumas and troubles is often thought to be leading towards an impending apocalypse, Choi asks us to consider that it has already happened.She shows how, for many marginalized peoples, they have been already living in a post-apocalyptic world for decades, such as in the title poem:

‘[T]he apocalypse began
When Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent was drawn into cutlets. It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, Begin at the beginning. By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended.’

In an interview with Alyssa Lo from Catapult, Choi says ‘it might be helpful to remember that the apocalypse happened a long time ago and that our people have survived it and have been surviving it for many years,’ and thus the collection, which builds itself around the title poem, looks at the sadness but also at the ‘unthinkably inventive modes of survival’. The ways in hardship people conclude ‘Why not / smother doubt to save the family / we’re responsible for.’The poem With Mouths and Mushrooms, the Earth Will Accept Our Apology, for example, nods to the matsutake mushrooms that were the first living thing to come from the devastated landscape of Hiroshima after the bombing. Here, Choi contemplates the renewal of the natural world, with or without us, after humans have wrecked our environment. It reminded me of the hope in the final paragraph in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road where the plant life begins to slowly return and ‘hummed of mystery.’ The hope in this book takes hold even through all the darkness.

‘O beasts of fortune, I am loved sweetest by the horrors of blood,
By my own, and by ours, blessed root rot, by ours.’

Choi looks back to her ancestors frequently in this collection, as guides and as touchstones to moments in history. ‘Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run / to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,’ she writes, feeling part of a lengthy legacy that has endured history but has been scarred in the process, ‘I come from a short line of women / who were handed husbands as salvation from rape.’ The legacy of misogyny and homophobia lurks in all the corners, even language as in one poem Choi looks at how the term ‘comfort woman’—Korean girls who were kidnapped and put into sexual servitude for the Japanese army during WWII—was a phrase to comfort the perpetrators of sexual violence, linguistically softening the connotation of their actions where the term ‘sexual slavery’ would have shed more truth. ‘Whatever helps you bear the day // whatever sweet, what touch’ Through it all, however, Choi builds a hope for the future as a way to bear the legacy into a new light, and hopefully we will all survive the many apocalypses that are to come.

But what sort of legacy are we leaving? In Protest Poem, she considers the ‘as-yet-unbuilt museum/ of what we had to survive / to make paradise/ from its ruins,’ what artifacts of today will we leave behind, and what will it say of our present. In Science Fiction Poem, she lists the many minor ‘dystopias’ of our daily living, causing us to look around us in a new framing and acknowledge what we endure. This can be comical, such as in another she considers how with the world heading towards political and environmental disaster, we look away and fill our time with online shopping. Though one of her most powerful poems, Field Trip to the Museum of Human History , addresses the legacy of police brutality where ‘In America, there were no greater / protections from police than wealth and whiteness.’ Partly inspired by The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Choi herself has been a prison abolition advocate and it makes its way into the hope that is central to her work.

‘You don’t have
To believe in something for it to startle you awake.’

With poems that either grip you by the throat or the heart, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a dazzling and chilling collection of poetry. The dives through history are dark, but Choi never leaves us without a hint of hope for light at the other end of the tunnel.

4.5/5

[aly ☆彡 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on is such a brilliant piece and that is just the truth pill we need to swallow.

"I'm distance skinned. No one can put a story inside me, but me. If not even my memories love me enough to say"

In this work, you can see Choi consolidated ecopoetics and existentialism in her poems in place to balance her desire to lament both the devastation of the world and the death of the self — which were shaped by her experiences as a Korean American poet living in diaspora between the two countries and not fitting into neither, making this collection as incisive as it is tender.

Despite this whole personal experience that Choi infused in this work that may not allow us to fully resonate; especially when we are not part of the marginalized communities, we can all still identify with the pain and novelty of tragedy, which first leaves us reeling with astonishment before numbing us with indifference. Quite simply, Choi may be able to put your feelings into words more effectively than you can if you're struggling to stay awake in the present while feeling exhausted.

Again, I wouldn't think there are better ways to convey what Choi is doing here than in a form of poetry. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On showcases Choi's ability as she masters a variety of technical aspects of poetry while firmly establishing her verse in dire yet genuine feelings.

Was I a big fan of modern written poetry? No, not really. Does it, however, prevent the message from being delivered? Absolutely not. Just as thought-provoking and timely as ever was Choi's writing. If I were guaranteed a piece of writing as exquisite as this one, Choi might just allow me to open the doors for this kind of ecocriticism in a form of modern poetry in the future.

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

seamlessly straddles the border between total nihilism and a grateful wonder at what the world allows us brief glimpses of—like both the bagel and the googly eye in everything everywhere all at once, the latest franny choi installment declares, “nothing matters,” on two levels (derogatory and dumbfounded).

but here’s what I want: / a tight circle around everyone I love; / a stove that doesn’t burn. O year, / O shitstorm, it’s impossible to be alive, impossible / to be dead.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book of poetry by the Korean-American author Franny Choi.

Mainly deals with racism, the U.S. bombing of Japan in WWII, the death of Choi's boyfriend, and the apocalypse.

It's pretty dark and depressing. But good. Compelling.

DISASTER MEANS "WITHOUT A STAR"

Sixty-six million years after the end of the world, 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.

Another episode of the present tense, and I can’t stop thinking
about the timeline where the asteroid misses, Earth ruled eternally
by the car-hearted and walnut-brained. Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging
on the butterfly effects of ashes, ashes; reaching for the oat milk

while, hundreds of feet below, a chalk line marks the moment we were all
doomed. We were done for. We were science fiction before science,
or fiction. One billion judgment days later, I’m alive and ashamed
of my purchases; I’m afraid of being afraid; I’m the world’s worst mother.

My sister calls, and it’s already too late for things to be better. Every mistake,
an asteroid that’s already hit, history already mushroomed into one million species
of unfit, their fossilized corpses already forming coastlines, austere offices.
This year was a layer cake of catastrophe long before any of us could,

biologically speaking, have been imagined. Human History, a front parlor
infinitely painted over with massacre, and into the fray came I, highly allergic,
quick to cry, and armed with fat fists of need. I broke everything I touched.
I got good grades. I was told nothing was more noble than to ensure

my children would eat. I learned to take a chicken apart with my hands,
to fill in a Scantron, cry on cue. Sixty-six million years after the last
great extinction, six to eight business days before the next one, I whispered
Speak to a fucking agent into the hold music to trigger the system into connecting

me with a “real person.” I avoided coughing in public, though it was too late.
I applied for a BIPOC farming intensive, though it was too late for the earth
to yield anything but more corpses. New species of horror sequence
were already evolving: election bot; cluster bio-bomb; driverless wife.

I muttered curses to keep the deepfakes away, studied the stars for signs
of the worlds to come, though they were already here—the extinctions
and feudal lords, the dirty blankets, the dissidents tied to stakes or hung
from branches, the price gouge, death camp, flood, bombs of liberty, bomb

and bomb and bomb already dropped, already having made me
from its dust, already broken and paid for and straddling my crown.
What crown? If I’m king of anything, it’s being late. Omw, I type,
though I’m still huddled in last year’s mistakes. Asteroid, Alexa corrects,
and I say, Five minutes. Just give me five minutes. I’ll be right there.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀

"By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place."

War, historical conflicts, present crises, and apocalyptic visions, are the motifs of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes. Some poems are brief, others read less like poems than sections from someone’s journal or a piece of writing that will eventually lead to an essay or an article. As much as I wanted to love this collection, Choi’s language failed to draw me in. Often it struck me as affected so that I was all too aware of Choi’s creating and writing presence and unable to actually fall into the images, descriptions and reflections that she creates. This is a pity as I did appreciate how she adopted a collective perspective and at times a more personal one. For instance, when exploring episodes of violence she draws from history and colonial pasts, but also from her own experience with violence and disruption. I also did like how the images Choi conjures are often of a cyclical nature and blur the line between baggings and endings.

As much as I admired the concept of this collection, for its themes and the issues it sets out to shed a light on, I just could not lose myself in Choi’s language. I know queerness was a theme but it felt submerged by a language that was trying to impress its own lyricism onto its readers.
Her poems as they just brought to mind my time workshopping other students' work during a creative writing class I took at uni (make of that what you will). But as I have said in other poetry reviews, I am still new to the poetry reading ‘scene’ and therefore, if this collection happens to be on your radar, you should check out more positive and/or in-depth reviews. If you are on the lookout for poetry concerned with survival, the future, past and ongoing violence, fraught histories, heritage and identity, and dystopian visions, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes may be the perfect read for you.

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

'What I want you to know is that we’re okay. Hurting
but okay. We’re surviving, though it’s true,
we don’t know what that means, exactly.'

Choi ('Soft Science') extends her range with a hard-hitting, urgent collection that focuses attention on endemic social problems. A difficult and often painful reading experience. It is equally a plea for awareness and empathy as it is a call for collective action and outrage. Can poetry change the world at all? Well, it starts with poets of this calibre.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audiobook…read by Franny Choi
….1 hour and 59 minutes

Wow… so much truth!
….hurt. pain. emotional collapse. hostility. social issues. political strife. injustice. poverty. racism. human devastations. Helpless people. Debts. Loneliness. Bone tire.

“Like everyone else, I want a storm to dance in…
…..and change my life like everyone else”.

[Ken]

If you’re looking for escapist poetry, Franny Choi is not your poet. The World Keeps Going, and the World Goes On will prove the point well enough, as it is rife with the political poetry of outrage.

Yes, this is unusual. Politics makes for difficult subject matter, after all. Poets who go there risk devolving into rants. I would say, overall, that Choi avoids that pitfall, however. Many of her poems contain terrific imagery and creative thoughts. I admit that, for me, some of the poems succeed more in part than as a whole, but that’s certainly not true of every poem in the collection.

Here’s an example, one that asks the reader’s help in making sense of the news:


Poem With an End in Sight

I don’t have a brain for anything
that’s happening on-screen. I don’t

have a brain for the men yelling over
each other, I’ve done an amazing job,

their cheeks flushed and flaking. I’ve done
an amazing job. I have two degrees

and couldn’t have saved anyone, couldn’t
have saved a dog. I have a million ideas.

I have last year’s ashes in my throat, stories
stuffed so full of morals they bleed sugar.

Midnight, and my stomachs drag
like nets through a river. Dawn,

and I’m out on the blacktop, praying
to no one, so no one prays back.

I know I should want to be torn open
by the failures of hope, but here’s what I want:

a tight circle around everyone I love;
a stove that doesn’t burn. O year,

O shitstorm, it’s impossible to be alive, impossible
to be dead. So, brainlessly, I tongue the news

again, instead. I have no condition but this:
ill-timed optimism; a disturbing tendency

toward pleasure; also, bad at reading tone.
For example, is this a hopeful poem,

or a hopeless one? If I write, there’s nothing
to be done, it’s a bird in the hand, i.e.,

worth its weight in dead bird. It’s so corny
to call for the tyrant’s head again, and yet.


Clever, no? Lots of variety in this collection – long and short, left-justified and right-justified (the print, not the politics), stanza formations, etc., but always with an intelligent approach that remembers to employ poetic elements liberally (back to politics!).

Maybe, then, Choi might be your cup of tea? If you wish more poets would roll up their sleeves and enter the fray, I’d say the yeahs have it. If you feel like the front pages you read every day push you to the limit already, I hear a hearty nay.

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

extremely dynamic, timely, clever, and evocative poetry.

gorging on the butterfly effect of ashes

。。。

i listened to the audiobook narrated by franny choi, and it was an experience. poetry in general can be difficult for me to fully grasp, and i'd never listened to the audio version of a serious volume of poetry, only of novels in verse (although this distinction does make me wonder why regular poetry collections feel so much more serious).

choi's narration is very good, and the audio format makes it easy to see the cleverness in her turns of phrase; she is certainly a skilled poet. but i think listening to the book also made it more challenging for me to absorb it fully, and to distinguish between some of the poems.

however, some particularly memorable poems are easy to distinguish:

"science fiction poetry" made me cry right off the bat, very early in the book. it's about the many small dystopias of our everyday lives, and captures our era's feeling of hopelessness.

"wildlife" is a dreamy fantasy about animals, plants, the earth teeming with life, bursting in beautiful ways. this one feels almost utopian, which is refreshing amidst choi's other subject matter, which is often rather dark.

"dispatches from a future great great granddaughter" hits all the right tearful spots. it reassures us that our helpless age will pass and shift into something else. something with its own challenges, but still, things won't remain this way forever. i love this poem for its quiet hopefulness, despite acknowledging the pain of being alive right now.

[Sunny Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 the title says it all

[Alan]

I enjoyed this collection a lot more than Franny Choi’s Soft Science, but it didn’t really connect with me. Technically, she is superb. The content doesn’t match what I am going for - it’s mostly political outrage, and I’m not in that ballpark right now.

My favourite poem was Grief is a Thing With Tense Issues.

I also want to learn a bit more about the technical aspects of poems - I have never taken formal classes on literature. Well, that’s a lie. I took a literature class in the 12th grade, got through Genesis and Exodus, and dropped the class as we were getting to Chaucer. My teacher was worried at the time - took me aside and asked me if I plan to keep reading in my life as an activity. I told him he had nothing to worry about, but he must have thought I was just saying that so he would fuck off. Well, dude… I didn’t lie to you.

Anyway, as I was saying, I will need to get another primer for specific poetic conventions. Sometimes things are right justified, sometimes there are random spaces, sometimes punctuation is used just because the poet wanted to. What dictates these stylistic choices? How do the readers come to it? What does it all mean for how they sound phonetically, how should they be read out loud? Huh.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Less ambitious than Soft Science and more concerned with the overtly contemporary (police brutality, life on stolen land, climate apocalypse, continuing to produce generations of family as the world collapses, the threat of nuclear war, etc.), this collection feels like a political work in an echo chamber. Those that will read these poems are most likely going to agree with everything Choi says, so it is less an eye-opening call to action and more a study of various forms of seemingly immovable ennui that invoke stasis. There's a tendency toward nihilism and a constant attempt to assuage such a tendency with swaths of considered beauty, of the hopeful plausibility of possibility. The poems don't achieve a high enough bar of poetic ecstacy for me to totally buy into her vision, but I find Choi to be a pleasant read. She's mostly direct and always moves you in slight ebbs. Pleasing and not immensely memorable but pleasing enough.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection both based on the poems individually as well as a whole. Choi grapples with challenging topics throughout, and does so incredibly masterfully. Not a single poem felt contrived or derivative, and every line was fresh, visceral and unique.

Her approach to rhythm, flow and content is utterly captivating and wildly brilliant. I’ve never read a poetry collection quite like this, but I’m excited to try more of her work.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great poetry collection, very much on brand with the conflicted title. Wonderful word play throughout. How are humans amazing and resilient but also responsible for atrocities like nuclear bombings and the practice of Korean "comfort women" ie forced prostitution by the Japanese army?

"deserve / deserve / what a sad little word"

"Every day of my life has been something / other than my last"

"If not even my memories / love me enough to stay"

[michelle (travelingbooknerds) · Rating 5 out of 5]

review to be posted upon the harper collins union workers receipt of a fair contract <3

for updates from the union, visit: https://www.instagram.com/hcpunion
you can also support the striking union workers by purchasing books through their harper collins union on strike bookshop at: https://bookshop.org/shop/hcpunion

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

• THE WORLD Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
gift copy from the publisher @eccobooks - thank you!
Grateful for my introduction to Choi's insights + lyric, will be seeking more of their work!

Themes: pandemic, apocalypse, Korean history, speculative futures.

[Renee Godding · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars

This collection of modern poems holds some beautiful imagery and wordplay, but it ultimately didn't connect with me in the way I wanted it to. It tackles some important and current topics like the pandemic, political instability (specifically in the US), climate change and feminism but plays it rather safe with many of them. I overall found myself "easily agreeing" with much of it, but nothing more. No boundaries were pushed, no thoughts were being challenged, leaving me with a collection that was good, but not as memorable as I'd like it to be.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great poetry by Franny Choi. I had the pleasure of hearing this book narrated on audio. Beautiful, powerful, thought-provoking, political. Apocalypse. We think the world is going to end (didn't we say this years ago, centuries ago?) but it keeps going. Thank you for this book, Franny Choi.

[Sotiria Lazaridou · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a genius title and what a great collection of poetry!!

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.

(from “Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness”)

How can I explain the things and things and things I did wrong?
I was never any good at telling the difference between
what wanted me and what wanted me gone.

(from “September 2001”)

I know I should want to be torn open
by the failures of hope, but here’s what I want:

a tight circle around everyone I love;
a stove that doesn’t burn. O year,

O shitstorm, it’s impossible to be alive, impossible
to be dead.

(from “Poem with an End in Sight”)

[charlotte, · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be fair to say that Franny Choi is one of my favourite poets right now. There’s just something about her work that has that quality of forcing you to stop for a moment after each line just to absorb it. That has been the case for me in both her previous collections and definitely in this one too. I’m not sure there was a poem in here that I didn’t like, that’s how good it was. Definitely one I’ll be coming back to over and over.

[Mallory Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading this collection left me with that lump in my throat that won't go away. it's visceral and quick and painful, and genuinely i adored every poem. covering themes of war, protest, identity, and race, this collection is as sharp as it is tender, and it's one that i feel like i could read a hundred times and still find something new.

[Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On Choi dives into the downfall of democracy, framing this idea of apocalypse and questioning if we're already living in or rather through one. With a science fiction twist, Choi paints our world as a dystopian landscape, filled with urgent reflections on endings. She navigates the horrors of history and the present, pondering the future we have to offer. The topics explored in this collection range from global issues, like World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic, to personal ones, exploring identity and survival.

One of the most substantial arguments Choi makes in this collection is that for many marginalized communities, the apocalypse has already happened. Her powerful title poem captures this notion, tracing back to historical events like Columbus's arrival:

‘The apocalypse began when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent was drawn into cutlets. It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, begin at the beginning. By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended.’

In later poems, she reflects on the atomic bombings and the way that World War II changed people’s perspectives on life and war. Furthermore, Choi often looks to her ancestors, reflecting on their enduring legacies and the scars of history. Poems about "comfort women" highlight linguistic and cultural examinations of trauma as the phrase was used to comfort the perpetrators of sexual violence, linguistically softening the connotation of their horrific actions. One of my favorite poems was Grief is a Confusion of Tenses where she examines how language shapes our grieving process as we have to learn to accommodate this new reality where someone is physically gone but still so present in our lives. Through such vivid imagery and poignant prose, she urges the reader to see ourselves as survivors of past devastations.

Yet, this collection also offers hope, like in the poem about matsutake mushrooms, which were the first sign of renewal from the devastated landscape of Hiroshima. Choi contemplates the renewal of the natural world, with or without us, after humans have literally and figuratively scorched the earth. She also asks us to consider what sort of legacy are we leaving behind? In Protest Poem, she discusses what artifacts of today will we leave for our inheritors, and what these can say of our present. This blend of nihilism and satire challenges the reader to reconsider our daily lives in the grand scheme of the dystopian times many feel we are living through. Yet, Choi leaves us with a glimmer of hope for the future; a small light at the end of the tunnel as we are reminded throughout this collection of our resilience!

[Lia Strange · Rating 1 out of 5]

no me gusto nada, empezó fuerte y después me preguntaba en cada poema porque lo seguía leyendo.

"was I standing on, the last time we survived?"

[Ebony (EKG)]

the world keeps ending and the world goes on poses that we have not just arrived at the apocalypse, but that the apocalypse started at the beginning of the world. these poems explored marginalization, the effects of the atomic bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki, the Korean American experience, and life in the post modern age (existential, are we all doomed?).

mainly this poetry collection poses the duality between the end and the beginning, liberation and imprisonment, being haunted and being divine.

i had a bit of a hard time connecting to the overall collection, but i did love certain poems. this isn’t my typical preferred poetry style but i’m glad i got out of my comfort zone.

[Sarah Cavar]

It’s strange. This goes through the motions of being a poetry collection about contemporary disasters — climate change, grief, the long and ongoing legacies of colonization, police violence. But it is also so, remarkably sterile — using the right words with polished grace, but without much feeling behind it. Disappointing, honestly, compared to Choi’s other work.

[Hannah Showalter · Rating 4 out of 5]

franny choi is an INCREDIBLE poet. i think i liked this book more than soft science, maybe? hard to tell!! i need to read them both a second time i think.

[Zoë Howard]

If anyone has contemporary poetry recs please let me know because I have yet to find a collection that doesn’t make me want to bash my head into brick wall

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars! I'm not great with poetry analysis, all I can ever say is if poetry made me feel... stuff (haha, eloquence) and this definitely felt cathartic to me, relatable and yeah, I did get misty-eyed a few times. Since I am someone who has said time and time again since 2020 that it felt like the world ended and that I wished we acknowledged that and built a better one, well... this collection really hit its target with me. It feels like the world ended so many times in the past few years, from events that affect all of us to ones that are intensely personal and as a consequence, they're isolating in their intimate grief. I get that so well...

Every day of my life has been something other than my last.
Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

And finally, a writer who does understand something about kink-related things, emotions & experiences:

sit facing a friend and hold our palms together without touching;
take turns completing the phrase, It could have been that . . . ;
draw my face from memory;

ask a friend to bind me with rope until I can’t move, tense up until I cry;
then laugh until the ties loosen; until everything loosens;

Also, also, I very much recommend the audiobook, read by Franny Choi, it was lovely to walk around the city listening to these poems!

[Peycho Kanev]

It Is What It Is

Each morning, on her way
to make a living, my mother passes
that business, now closed, where—
I’ve tried not to think of it—
a man killed three Korean mothers
just like mine.
Her voice echoes, heavy,
into the tunnel between us:

What am I supposed to do?
Be afraid?

What am I supposed to do?
In the tunnel between us,
her voice echoes, heavy
just like mine.

A man killed three Korean mothers.

I’ve tried not to think of it.
That business, now closed. Where
to make a life? My mother passes
each morning on her way.