The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
In Franny Choi’s third full-length collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, the apocalyptic future is now. And it is also the past: repetition is the pulse of this book in subject and practice. The titular opening poem repeats apocalypse in a chronicle of historical cycles of violence and control, and the word dystopia opens each line of “Science Fiction Poetry.” In one of four consecutive poems titled “Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel,” Choi reminds us: “Dystopia is the word for what’s already happened / so many times, it’s the reason ______’s so cheap.” Even resistance comes with anaphoric insistence, courtesy of the ampersand in “On How”: “we wrote new chants / & bailed folks out / & plate-scooped meals / & healed old wounds.” Jarring juxtapositions populate Choi’s litanies, and “Things That Already Go Past Borders” includes
insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music
at the right volume; headlights; human
remains; wireless signals; all manner
of money; of memory; people
in trucks; on trains; on foot; in line […]
In Choi’s world of doom and waste and unshakeable history, the way out comes most clearly with our demise:
Someday we’ll lie in dirt.
With mouths and mushrooms, the earth
will accept our apology.
Irony abounds as the speaker orders “an emergency go-bag from Amazon” and later admits, “I am alive and ashamed of my purchase; I’m afraid of being afraid […].”
When Choi examines the different perspectives on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in “Haibun for How We Got Here,” her chiseled syllabics land on a single, weighted word:
Sliced from bone, my life
hung like a jaw—faultless. And
unforgivable
The paradox of how we can live in this disastrous world, and handle our own culpability, burns through this collection, which concludes, if not quiet hopefully, at least not in disaster. The book’s final poem imagines an
[…] as-yet-
unbuilt museum
of what we had to survive
to make paradise
from its ruins.
