The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Written by Franny Choi

Narrated by Franny Choi

From acclaimed 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 our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.

With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems 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. These poems explore 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. 

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063240117

Franny Choi

Franny Choi is the author of three poetry collections, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2023), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). They are Faculty in Literature at Bennington College and founded Brew & Forge, a project that aims to build connections between writers, artists, and organizers.

Reviews for The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

[Merle Arrowsmith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very delicate, beautiful and moving poetry, to be appreciated in small bites only, unless you wish to revel in quiet despair und sorrow for this endangered world of ours...

[theonastine.a · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't have anything to say. Can I just rate it without writing pretentious review?

[Ben Snider · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Moving in its imagery. Delicate in its meter. Beautiful in its Mastery.

[Kalu Esther · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is my first time listening to Franny Choi, and as a Korean lover, I enjoyed the poems. Talking about the comfort women during the Korean War made me reminisce on a Kdrama I watched last year, Tomorrow.

This poetry collection has poems from different eras, the past, present and future.

[Tadeja Kuhar · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

beautiful! I loved that the author was the narrator. !