The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

By: 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 quee