Franny Choi

From acclaimed and beloved 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 the last years dystopic. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples, and calls forth the importance of imagining what will persist in the aftermaths. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time. They look into the collective psyche of our years in the pandemic and in the throes of anti-racist uprisings, while imagining other vectors, directions, and futures. Stories of survival collide across space and time--from comfort women during the Korean War 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. Throughout, Choi grapples with where the individual can fit within the strange landscapes of this apocalyptic world, with its violent and many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. In The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, old and new stories are put through a collider; what emerges is pure sonic energy, grounded by the complex entanglements that connect us all. The combination of the speculative imagination, playfulness, and wisdom in these poems ultimately chart new paths toward hope.

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

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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.

Lindsay

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.

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.

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—

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.

This sense of impending catastrophe is an illusion, however, because the trauma never quite arrives. It never arrives because it has already happened.

I was never any good at telling the difference between what wanted me and what wanted me gone.

I’m a short lie of a woman whom men have wanted to tear apart with their good strong hands. I mean, same.

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.

am I the colonization or the reparations?

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On quotes

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