WEBVTT

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I love a good end
of the world book.

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And Franny Choi's The World
Keeps Ending and the World Goes

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On does not disappoint.

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It is packed with beautiful
ways to say we're cooked.

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Here are some of my favorites.

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"It's already too late
for things to be better.

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I want the clarity of
the catastrophe, but not

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the catastrophe.

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The good news is that
things will go back

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to the way they were,
which is also the bad news.

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Dystopia, I liked the
old Dystopia better.

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Dystopia, congratulations.

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You were right to be paranoid.

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Say it with me.

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We won't be OK.

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Someday we'll lie in dirt
with mouths and mushrooms.

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The Earth will
accept our apology."

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As a self-proclaimed
cheerful pessimist,

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these lines really
resonate with me.

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I too often too
casually will say

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we live in the worst timeline.

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And then the next day,
I wake up to a child

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I made with my own body.

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I can't believe I
exist in this universe,

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and I mean that in the best
and worst possible ways.

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Franny Choi helps me exist
in that contrast of a reality

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to remark, and remember, and
refuse, and reach forward

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anyway.

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To hold the good things in
the light, however briefly,

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and to make a sound strong
enough to make the plate glass

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crack.

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This isn't a hopeful book
of poems, or a hopeless one,

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it is a desperate incantation
to form a quote "tight circle

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around everyone I love.

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It is a reach machine
outstretched toward grace."

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Franny, I love the
idea that a poem

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is a reach machine, that
a poem makes you stretch,

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moves you beyond what the
sockets in your own body

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believe they can touch.

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And Franny's poems feel
like a series of reaches,

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hyperextending in the dark
for a thing we hope know

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is on the other side of doom.

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And once we find
that reachable thing,

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I believe Franny wants
us to hold it tight.

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Because in a poem
ironically titled,

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How to Let Go of the
World, the speaker says,

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"in lieu of all I can't
do or undo, I hold."

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Franny invites us to hold the
inhumane as humanely as we can.

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Franny shakes our shoulders
with all the histories

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we are carrying, the fact that
the unthinkable has already,

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already happened again.

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Franny acknowledges every
dystopia, disaster, catastrophe,

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apocalypse, atrocity
has, will, is happening.

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Franny writes in a
series of poems titled,

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Upon Learning That Some Korean
War Refugees Used Partially

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Detonated Napalm
Canisters as Cooking Fuel,

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that "All night doom
rang from the sky,

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and in the morning there
are mouths to feed."

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That's what living in
unprecedented times feels like.

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The world is ending, and
there are dishes to wash.

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The world is ending,
and an unskippable ad

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plays before you can see what
human rights were rolled back

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today.

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The world is ending as it
has thousands and thousands

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of times.

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And somehow, we're still
here to write poems about it

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to bear witness, to bind
a tight protective circle

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around everything we love.

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Franny writes, "I'll take any
sound that'll shake me from

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doom's haze."

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Franny writes, "I'm like you,
still drooling after a perfect

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world, even as the
stars warble off-key,

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and the oceans rattle
with plastics."

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Franny writes a letter
from an improbable

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You, a future
great, great grand.

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Someone who writes.

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"What I want you to know is
that we're OK, hurting, but OK.

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We're surviving, though it's
true we don't know exactly what

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that means."

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That's really how it feels.

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Thank you, Franny
Choi, for writing

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poems that break glass, that
avoid oblivion, that forage

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and foam at the mouth, that
track blood, that reach

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and bind, that incantate,
that keep remembering,

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that make us feel less
alone and less insane.

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Please help me in
welcoming Franny Choi.

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[APPLAUSE]

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