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The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 17, 2022
      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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Franny Choi delivers these hopeful, heartbreaking, beautiful, sorrowful poems with quiet ardor. Her voice is soft and expressive, perfectly capturing the musical yet conversational tone of the whole collection. The poems are about everyday apocalypses and historical apocalypses; small moments of terror and joy; and the paradox of living on this planet, full of so much suffering and beauty. Some of the most powerful poems are the ones about past and future disasters: climate change, Covid, and the Korean War. But Choi also has an eye for intimate detail, as evidenced in the gorgeous poems about family relationships and past loves. Her voice never wavers except in moments of intense emotion, when it rises like a tide, drawing listeners in. L.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

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