The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that the apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric & tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards & forward 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 & 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 & many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness - between Black & Asian & other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity & conquest - could look like.

In The World Keeps Ending, & the World Goes On, old & 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, & wisdom in these poems ultimately chart new paths toward hope.

°°°

FRANNY CHOI is a writer, performer, & educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) & the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, & her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, & elsewhere. Her second collection, Soft Science, was published by Alice James Books in April 2019.