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benplatt's review against another edition
4.0
Choi's collection sets its sights on endings of all kinds, focusing on the repetition that the title implies, as endings occur all around and within us all the time. The scales of those endings, their severity, and even their affect, vary, though, and this variance is what allows Choi to unwind a whole collection around this theme of repeated endings that plays with formal repetition in a way that never grows stale.
The world has ended many times before for many different people and communities, but this collection is neither nihilistic nor lost in abstraction. All the endings of many worlds, past, present, and even speculatively in the future (these future-facing poems formally highlight Choi's determination not to give in to nihilism), are punctuated by those that survive them. The collection ends with a protest poem that drives home Choi's focus: that with every world that ends, "another ending world spun in its place," often a world brought about by people coming together and building something with the pieces left behind. That when one world ends, it still informs what's next, for better or for worse, so we damn well better make sure we make something of this world, ending or not.
The world has ended many times before for many different people and communities, but this collection is neither nihilistic nor lost in abstraction. All the endings of many worlds, past, present, and even speculatively in the future (these future-facing poems formally highlight Choi's determination not to give in to nihilism), are punctuated by those that survive them. The collection ends with a protest poem that drives home Choi's focus: that with every world that ends, "another ending world spun in its place," often a world brought about by people coming together and building something with the pieces left behind. That when one world ends, it still informs what's next, for better or for worse, so we damn well better make sure we make something of this world, ending or not.
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.’
The apocalypse of the present has become ‘so loud we finally stopped hearing it,’ warns poet and activist Franny Choi in her third collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. A hard hitting collection that centers on concepts of endings, Choi blissfully incorporates the aesthetics of science fiction into her poetry, crafting landscapes of the now as dystopian wastelands that make this read with a rather epic sense of urgency. ‘Grief's a heavy planet’ and Choi takes us through the horrors of the past and present and asks us what the future will hold. There are difficult questions poetically posed, moving between global scales wondering if it is already ‘too late for the earth / to yield anything but more corpses,’ to more personal examinations of identity such as when she asks ‘am I the colonization or the reparations? (she adds later ‘I choose to be the reparations’). The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a powerful collection of socio-political criticisms, and examinations of history and cultural identity that delivers lines that will knock you right over and others that will tug your heartstrings with such an urgency that you cannot, and should not, look away.
‘Sliced from bone, my life
Hung like a jaw—faultless. And
Unforgivable.’
The weight of history hangs heavy in each of these poems, moving across atrocities of war—such as the dropping of the atomic bombs which figure into several poems—mass refugee and immigration movements, and even into the present with poems addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. While the amalgamation of traumas and troubles is often thought to be leading towards an impending apocalypse, Choi asks us to consider that it has already happened.She shows how, for many marginalized peoples, they have been already living in a post-apocalyptic world for decades, such as in the title poem:
In an interview with Alyssa Lo from Catapult, Choi says ‘it might be helpful to remember that the apocalypse happened a long time ago and that our people have survived it and have been surviving it for many years,’ and thus the collection, which builds itself around the title poem, looks at the sadness but also at the ‘unthinkably inventive modes of survival’. The ways in hardship people conclude ‘Why not / smother doubt to save the family / we’re responsible for.’The poem With Mouths and Mushrooms, the Earth Will Accept Our Apology, for example, nods to the matsutake mushrooms that were the first living thing to come from the devastated landscape of Hiroshima after the bombing. Here, Choi contemplates the renewal of the natural world, with or without us, after humans have wrecked our environment. It reminded me of the hope in the final paragraph in [a:Cormac McCarthy|4178|Cormac McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1611995562p2/4178.jpg]’s [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1600241424l/6288._SY75_.jpg|3355573] where the plant life begins to slowly return and ‘hummed of mystery.’ The hope in this book takes hold even through all the darkness.
‘O beasts of fortune, I am loved sweetest by the horrors of blood,
By my own, and by ours, blessed root rot, by ours.’
Choi looks back to her ancestors frequently in this collection, as guides and as touchstones to moments in history. ‘Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run / to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,’ she writes, feeling part of a lengthy legacy that has endured history but has been scarred in the process, ‘I come from a short line of women / who were handed husbands as salvation from rape.’ The legacy of misogyny and homophobia lurks in all the corners, even language as in one poem Choi looks at how the term ‘comfort woman’—Korean girls who were kidnapped and put into sexual servitude for the Japanese army during WWII—was a phrase to comfort the perpetrators of sexual violence, linguistically softening the connotation of their actions where the term ‘sexual slavery’ would have shed more truth. ‘Whatever helps you bear the day // whatever sweet, what touch’ Through it all, however, Choi builds a hope for the future as a way to bear the legacy into a new light, and hopefully we will all survive the many apocalypses that are to come.
But what sort of legacy are we leaving? In Protest Poem, she considers the ‘as-yet-unbuilt museum/ of what we had to survive / to make paradise/ from its ruins,’ what artifacts of today will we leave behind, and what will it say of our present. In Science Fiction Poem, she lists the many minor ‘dystopias’ of our daily living, causing us to look around us in a new framing and acknowledge what we endure. This can be comical, such as in another she considers how with the world heading towards political and environmental disaster, we look away and fill our time with online shopping. Though one of her most powerful poems, Field Trip to the Museum of Human History, addresses the legacy of police brutality where ‘In America, there were no greater / protections from police than wealth and whiteness.’ Partly inspired by The Dispossessed by [a:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg], Choi herself has been a prison abolition advocate and it makes its way into the hope that is central to her work.
‘You don’t have
To believe in something for it to startle you awake.’
With poems that either grip you by the throat or the heart, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a dazzling and chilling collection of poetry. The dives through history are dark, but Choi never leaves us without a hint of hope for light at the other end of the tunnel.
4.5/5
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.’
The apocalypse of the present has become ‘so loud we finally stopped hearing it,’ warns poet and activist Franny Choi in her third collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. A hard hitting collection that centers on concepts of endings, Choi blissfully incorporates the aesthetics of science fiction into her poetry, crafting landscapes of the now as dystopian wastelands that make this read with a rather epic sense of urgency. ‘Grief's a heavy planet’ and Choi takes us through the horrors of the past and present and asks us what the future will hold. There are difficult questions poetically posed, moving between global scales wondering if it is already ‘too late for the earth / to yield anything but more corpses,’ to more personal examinations of identity such as when she asks ‘am I the colonization or the reparations? (she adds later ‘I choose to be the reparations’). The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a powerful collection of socio-political criticisms, and examinations of history and cultural identity that delivers lines that will knock you right over and others that will tug your heartstrings with such an urgency that you cannot, and should not, look away.
‘Sliced from bone, my life
Hung like a jaw—faultless. And
Unforgivable.’
The weight of history hangs heavy in each of these poems, moving across atrocities of war—such as the dropping of the atomic bombs which figure into several poems—mass refugee and immigration movements, and even into the present with poems addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. While the amalgamation of traumas and troubles is often thought to be leading towards an impending apocalypse, Choi asks us to consider that it has already happened.She shows how, for many marginalized peoples, they have been already living in a post-apocalyptic world for decades, such as in the title poem:
‘[T]he 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.’
In an interview with Alyssa Lo from Catapult, Choi says ‘it might be helpful to remember that the apocalypse happened a long time ago and that our people have survived it and have been surviving it for many years,’ and thus the collection, which builds itself around the title poem, looks at the sadness but also at the ‘unthinkably inventive modes of survival’. The ways in hardship people conclude ‘Why not / smother doubt to save the family / we’re responsible for.’The poem With Mouths and Mushrooms, the Earth Will Accept Our Apology, for example, nods to the matsutake mushrooms that were the first living thing to come from the devastated landscape of Hiroshima after the bombing. Here, Choi contemplates the renewal of the natural world, with or without us, after humans have wrecked our environment. It reminded me of the hope in the final paragraph in [a:Cormac McCarthy|4178|Cormac McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1611995562p2/4178.jpg]’s [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1600241424l/6288._SY75_.jpg|3355573] where the plant life begins to slowly return and ‘hummed of mystery.’ The hope in this book takes hold even through all the darkness.
‘O beasts of fortune, I am loved sweetest by the horrors of blood,
By my own, and by ours, blessed root rot, by ours.’
Choi looks back to her ancestors frequently in this collection, as guides and as touchstones to moments in history. ‘Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run / to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,’ she writes, feeling part of a lengthy legacy that has endured history but has been scarred in the process, ‘I come from a short line of women / who were handed husbands as salvation from rape.’ The legacy of misogyny and homophobia lurks in all the corners, even language as in one poem Choi looks at how the term ‘comfort woman’—Korean girls who were kidnapped and put into sexual servitude for the Japanese army during WWII—was a phrase to comfort the perpetrators of sexual violence, linguistically softening the connotation of their actions where the term ‘sexual slavery’ would have shed more truth. ‘Whatever helps you bear the day // whatever sweet, what touch’ Through it all, however, Choi builds a hope for the future as a way to bear the legacy into a new light, and hopefully we will all survive the many apocalypses that are to come.
But what sort of legacy are we leaving? In Protest Poem, she considers the ‘as-yet-unbuilt museum/ of what we had to survive / to make paradise/ from its ruins,’ what artifacts of today will we leave behind, and what will it say of our present. In Science Fiction Poem, she lists the many minor ‘dystopias’ of our daily living, causing us to look around us in a new framing and acknowledge what we endure. This can be comical, such as in another she considers how with the world heading towards political and environmental disaster, we look away and fill our time with online shopping. Though one of her most powerful poems, Field Trip to the Museum of Human History, addresses the legacy of police brutality where ‘In America, there were no greater / protections from police than wealth and whiteness.’ Partly inspired by The Dispossessed by [a:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg], Choi herself has been a prison abolition advocate and it makes its way into the hope that is central to her work.
‘You don’t have
To believe in something for it to startle you awake.’
With poems that either grip you by the throat or the heart, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a dazzling and chilling collection of poetry. The dives through history are dark, but Choi never leaves us without a hint of hope for light at the other end of the tunnel.
4.5/5
murphysmustread's review against another edition
3.0
rating: 2.75/5 stars
This was a short and simple book, but I found that it took a really modern approach to poetry. It touches on subjects such as immigration, sexual assault, and loosing a loved one. I definitely found myself writing in the margins and re-reading a couple of her pieces. A great example of how poetry doesn’t need to be boring!
This was a short and simple book, but I found that it took a really modern approach to poetry. It touches on subjects such as immigration, sexual assault, and loosing a loved one. I definitely found myself writing in the margins and re-reading a couple of her pieces. A great example of how poetry doesn’t need to be boring!
mariah_is_awkward's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
jachinheckman's review against another edition
4.0
"I will have missed your is Do you know that? Will you have/ known that?"
The title tells you what you need to know. It is a good one.
The title tells you what you need to know. It is a good one.
mayflxwer's review against another edition
4.0
modern, honest and masterful… so many underlined sections and lines