The World Doesn't End: A Pulitzer Prize Winner

By Charles Simic

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book Review

You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.

He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity.

Charles Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets us see through them. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 14, 1989
• ISBN: 9780547546889

Charles Simic

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

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Reviews for The World Doesn't End

[ennuiprayer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I gave the book four stars, but I think I'm being kind. The only reason I recommend the book is for its imagry. Other than that, if you the sort who doesn't want to read the abstract, then I suggest you don't buy the book.

[donp_47 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I started (coincidentally) reading this book around the same time I started reading Calvino's Numbers in the Dark, and while I've never seen those two names associated, some of the scenes Simic describes in his prose poems have a similar surrealistic quality, IMO. In some cases, even more surreal, for example with the piece that begins, "He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail, the stupid kid!"

[jbushnell_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The narratives arranged here are situated unclearly in time (there are skyscrapers but no computers or even telephones) and occasionally drift into the realm of the fabulous (characters like guardian angels and ambulating dead make appearances)—as a result the book reads something like a collection of children's tales, and it evokes a sense of wonder and potential that I recall deriving from books I read as a child. At the same time, the book is not truly "childlike"—if this is a book of "stories," it is a book of especially ambiguous, open-ended, lyrically dense stories, distinctly more rewarding to the sensibilities of adults than to those of children. I could not wish for a book with a better sense of balance.

[misirlou_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Is it even poetry? In interviews, Simic has laughed at the idea of the Pulitzer community giving the prize in poetry to his collection of "prose fragments." Personally, I don't care what they're called-- the important thing is that they're good. Surreal writing is hard to get away with. Either too boring or too disjointed to hold the attention of a reader, surreal writing (on the whole) doesn't thrive. The pieces in this book are entertaining, in the same tradition as Aloysius Bertrand (arguably the first prose poet), Simic approaches ordinary objects as something incredible while miracles are the most trivial things in the world. One passage involves the narrator blandly talking about his childhood of being stolen by gypsies, then his parents, as if he were writing a grocery list. Another passage treats a math problem as fantastic, a graveyard where the subject is forced to poke around with a piece of chalk. This approach makes this collection incredibly refreshing, readable, and it's definitely poetic. In comparison, the actual poems which end each section are rather bland. None of the insight, attention to language, or intricacies are present. Between this collection and Dime Store Alchemy (a book of prose passages/poems concerning Joseph Cornell, the artist who's work adorns the cover of The World Doesn't End), Simic establishes himself a master of the very form which he works so hard to deny practicing. It doesn't matter what category you place this book into, it's simply an amazing collection of writings.