The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on

Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick 

One of: Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022" * NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" Vulture's "10 Best Books of 2022"

A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a speculative 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 our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, an essential work of Asian American poetry, reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.

With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems about survival spin backwards and forwards in time―from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. This collection of queer poetry explores narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness―between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest―could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival. 

How do we find hope when the world keeps ending?

• Apocalyptic Poetry: Journey from the apocalypses of the past to the precipice of the climate crisis, examining the endings that have already happened and those yet to come.
• Social Justice Themes: A powerful call for solidarity between Black, Asian, and other marginalized communities wrestling with shared histories of conquest and calamity.
• Historical Reckoning: Unflinching poems that bear witness to the lives of Korean comfort women and the generational trauma of war.
• Lyrical Futurism: Explores queer linearity while charting new paths toward collective survival and hope in the aftermath.