The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
Reviews
by the end i liked it more but idk maybe this one wasnt for me
just the earth, with its thousand mouths, singing: I will. I will.
it’s exactly what it needed to be, of course.
Unsettling and gorgeous. Choi writes about the current, past and future ends of the world, they way the word has ended for marginalized people over and over again. With allusions to wildfires, the bombing of Hiroshima, the COVID-19 pandemic, her own mourning, and other individual world collapses, Choi shows us the edge of existence and the life that springs up, somehow, around it. I often read poetry quickly, the whole book in an hour, but this one made me want to sit with it for a long time- read the poems more than once, hear them out loud, and start again at the beginning when I was finished. I haven’t felt this way about a book of poetry since I first picked up Kaveh Akbar’s “Calling a Wolf a Wolf.” Every word is sharply chosen, but used with tenderness. As Choi plays with tense, it makes sense that this book feel both of its time and timeless. This is now among my favorite books of poetry.
Highlights
am I the colonization or the reparations?
-"Coalition Cento"
I don’t know how to do it: hold their faces in my hands and tell them what’s waiting. How to teach any of us to follow this song, into what dark.
-"How to Let Go of the World"
I’m a short lie of a woman whom men have wanted to tear apart with their good strong hands. I mean, same.
-"Unlove Poem"
I was never any good at telling the difference between what wanted me and what wanted me gone.
-"September 2001"
This sense of impending catastrophe is an illusion, however, because the trauma never quite arrives. It never arrives because it has already happened.
—Grace M. Cho
The good news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is also the bad news. Meanwhile, I cut an onion, and it’s onions all the way down, and that’s a fine reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empire congratulates itself on persisting again. No, thank you, I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finished mourning the last tyrant yet.
-"Celebrate Good Times"
if I say, Bless the cold water you throw on my face, does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort if I ask you not to kill my friends— if I beg you to press your heel against my throat— please, not enough to ruin me, but just so— just so I can almost see your face—
-"Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness"
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. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees, drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled, the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we finally stopped hearing it.
I was born from an apocalypse and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.
Every day, a sky is. / Miles are. We sing, entangled, and the root-world answers, / and together we’re making. Something of it. Something / of all those questions you left.