I love a good end of the world book.
And Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes
On does not disappoint.
It is packed with beautiful ways to say we're cooked.
Here are some of my favorites.
"It's already too late for things to be better.
I want the clarity of the catastrophe, but not
the catastrophe.
The good news is that things will go back
to the way they were, which is also the bad news.
Dystopia, I liked the old Dystopia better.
Dystopia, congratulations.
You were right to be paranoid.
Say it with me.
We won't be OK.
Someday we'll lie in dirt with mouths and mushrooms.
The Earth will accept our apology."
As a self-proclaimed cheerful pessimist,
these lines really resonate with me.
I too often too casually will say
we live in the worst timeline.
And then the next day, I wake up to a child
I made with my own body.
I can't believe I exist in this universe,
and I mean that in the best and worst possible ways.
Franny Choi helps me exist in that contrast of a reality
to remark, and remember, and refuse, and reach forward
anyway.
To hold the good things in the light, however briefly,
and to make a sound strong enough to make the plate glass
crack.
This isn't a hopeful book of poems, or a hopeless one,
it is a desperate incantation to form a quote "tight circle
around everyone I love.
It is a reach machine outstretched toward grace."
Franny, I love the idea that a poem
is a reach machine, that a poem makes you stretch,
moves you beyond what the sockets in your own body
believe they can touch.
And Franny's poems feel like a series of reaches,
hyperextending in the dark for a thing we hope know
is on the other side of doom.
And once we find that reachable thing,
I believe Franny wants us to hold it tight.
Because in a poem ironically titled,
How to Let Go of the World, the speaker says,
"in lieu of all I can't do or undo, I hold."
Franny invites us to hold the inhumane as humanely as we can.
Franny shakes our shoulders with all the histories
we are carrying, the fact that the unthinkable has already,
already happened again.
Franny acknowledges every dystopia, disaster, catastrophe,
apocalypse, atrocity has, will, is happening.
Franny writes in a series of poems titled,
Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially
Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel,
that "All night doom rang from the sky,
and in the morning there are mouths to feed."
That's what living in unprecedented times feels like.
The world is ending, and there are dishes to wash.
The world is ending, and an unskippable ad
plays before you can see what human rights were rolled back
today.
The world is ending as it has thousands and thousands
of times.
And somehow, we're still here to write poems about it
to bear witness, to bind a tight protective circle
around everything we love.
Franny writes, "I'll take any sound that'll shake me from
doom's haze."
Franny writes, "I'm like you, still drooling after a perfect
world, even as the stars warble off-key,
and the oceans rattle with plastics."
Franny writes a letter from an improbable
You, a future great, great grand.
Someone who writes.
"What I want you to know is that we're OK, hurting, but OK.
We're surviving, though it's true we don't know exactly what
that means."
That's really how it feels.
Thank you, Franny Choi, for writing
poems that break glass, that avoid oblivion, that forage
and foam at the mouth, that track blood, that reach
and bind, that incantate, that keep remembering,
that make us feel less alone and less insane.
Please help me in welcoming Franny Choi.
[APPLAUSE]