The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

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 speculative 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, an essential work of Asian American poetry, reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems about survival 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. This collection of queer poetry explores 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.  How do we find hope when the world keeps ending? Apocalyptic Poetry: Journey from the apocalypses of the past to the precipice of the climate crisis, examining the endings that have already happened and those yet to come. - Social Justice Themes: A powerful call for solidarity between Black, Asian, and other marginalized communities wrestling with shared histories of conquest and calamity. - Historical Reckoning: Unflinching poems that bear witness to the lives of Korean comfort women and the generational trauma of war. - Lyrical Futurism: Explores queer linearity while charting new paths toward collective survival and hope in the aftermath. "Franny Choi is one of my favorite poets and her new collection does not disappoint. These are incisive, elegant poems. There is a throughline of grief in many of the poem but the work demonstrates both stylistic and intellectual range. So excited for people to get into this book." - Roxane Gay “Virtuosic visionary Franny Choi beholds brutal reality and, with uncanny and singular genius, transforms it into revolution. Choi believes community, family, history, eros, truth, and love demand change worth living for/through. This book gives blood, voice, and generations of memory to the slim chance that we can change this world enough to survive its endless dystopia, war, violence. Somehow this poet still believes in us: that we might read this work and, made bold with desire, love the world so deeply it has to love us back.”  - Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museumi and Tanya “It was Franny Choi who first taught me the truism that every utopia requires an attendant dystopia, and here she catalogues them both with aplomb. Choi charts a path through the gloom and ecstasy of everyday catastrophe, always more mundane than we expected. It’s dull and violent and lined with ancestral memory and mushrooms ready to forage. Anyone who has lived through the daily absurdity of disaster— which is to say, all of us— can find a home here.”  - Eve L. Ewing, author of 1919 and Electric Arches "In this new collection,   Franny Choi brings her fierce intelligence, ferocious humor, and tonal virtuosity to new ground, imagining and reimagining utopia, dystopia, ongoingness, ending, and the end of ending. First loves, lost mothers, forever wars, 'little nevers' – the temporal vertigo of grief for country and kin, the anguish of failing to protect elders from being attacked – all are voiced in indelible song.... Choi   doesn’t flinch from 'what we had to survive/ to make paradise/ from its ruins,'   but, with equal bravery, insists on conceiving new communities, new possibilities, new tomorrows.... Her vision is luminous." - Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes From the Divided Country "A collection that will startle readers." - Library Journal (starred review) "Choi calls upon apocalypses of the past, present, and future to imagine a picture of what survival through community could look like." - Chicago Review of Books, " 12 Must-Read Books of November" "In these ecstatic lyrics, Choi explores what it means to survive in an era that teeters on the edge of apocalyptic doom." - Poets & Writers "Lines like these--poems like these--remind readers of what is possible in poetry. " - Shelf Awareness “Choi has crafted a fight song for the apocalypse. Music