A Review of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Some of us are just now waking up to the idea that it won’t go on: subways and parkways, Starbucks and Target, MMR shots and mug shots. All the things we call civilization may be swept away by rising waters, or drought, or roving RNA. What do we do with that knowledge? How do we picture our already-happening doom?

Franny Choi comes as close as any recent American poet to drawing that picture. Her collection begins by gathering scope, in poems of long lines, of collected atrocities: “brimstone eating California,” “the sky, shocked with dying” over “the graves of reefs,” while “Dispatches from Kenosha, // Louisville, Atlanta, arrive, arrive / like a steady kickdrum of sparrows / spatchcocked by gravity.” Choi goes on, as if she could create a pile of words big enough to serve as a barricade, to protect human beings from ourselves. Many of the poems feel like epitaphs, or ineffective apologies. “I’ve been, undoubtedly, an American,” she writes, “and done practically nothing to stop it.”

These lists, these regrets, these intense, even impossible demands accumulate around the poet in distress as they might accumulate around us all. “I know I should want to be torn open,” Choi writes, “by the failures of hope, but here’s what I want: // a tight circle around everyone I love; / a stove that doesn’t burn.” Who wouldn’t agree? Who can ignore—but who can concentrate full-time on—the big and burning now?

Choi’s elders saw the end of another world: the middle segments of Choi’s third book consider the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and the divided nation. “If the land in me could speak / to the land I live on, what would it say?” Choi asks. “Maybe I’m sorry. Or, where does it hurt?” Her American sense of worldwide catastrophe feels like the logical sequel to the all-around catastrophes of “comfort women” (a term she uses), of refugees. Choi takes on second- and third-generation wounds, with words recurring as grief does, recycling lines from one poem as titles for others, and repeating one of those titles (“Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel”) four times.

Those lists and titles point back to the present. Choi’s voices are overwhelming, and overwhelmed, “counting my life mostly / as a...