Poet Franny Choi believes that marginalized people have already experienced the apocalypse. In her latest poetry collection, she explores what it’s like to live in this never-ending dystopia.
The title of the new collection is The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On, and it feels pretty spot on for what is happening currently in our society. These poems uniquely feature past, present, and future world-endings. Choi writes directly and indirectly about how the world has already ended, the apocalypse has already happened, and survival is happening too.
Choi is a deeply observant poet whose curiosity and rage are palpable. This new full-length collection certainly delivers, following her 2019 Soft Science collection and her 2014 Floating, Brilliant, Gone collection. Some of her other work can be seen in The New York Times and The Atlantic. She is also the former co-host with Danez Smith of the poetry podcast VS. This collection dissects the ways that history has always been on the verge of the apocalypse while also touching on personal and intergenerational grief and how humanity endures while facing the globally desolate situations that have become too familiar. She also brings in themes of the power of love, protest, and collectivity. It’s both a timely and timeless collection that will turn anyone into a poetry lover.
Choi, who is Korean, talks about what she and her partner, who is black, have had to endure in modern society while also bringing in real historical disasters, such as the transatlantic slave trade and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that impacted their ancestors. These disasters can be looked at as dystopian since communities are constantly having to do everything in their power to survive catastrophic situations.
Here is an excerpt from The World Keeps Ending and The World Goes On:
Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats:
boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses
bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped
by flame. There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left—
of my mother unsticking herself from her mother’s grave as the plane
barreled down the runway. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of planes. There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way
through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was
the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses. Before which, the apocalypse
of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light.
Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses.
Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in
the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement
and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and
the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain;
the chairless martyr demanding a name. 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. 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. 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 stopped hearing it.
