Our Shared Catastrophes

In their stunning third collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Franny Choi speaks to the urgency of our shared catastrophes. They hold together conflicts of climate crisis and racial injustice, of strained personal relationships, and the growth coming (and needing to come) from it all. Choi is wide awake, pointing their readers to truths that are less and less possible to ignore if we all want to survive.

The title poem acts as premise, listing apocalypse after apocalypse, sitting me down and strapping me in for the ride ahead. Choi names what, too often these days, is relentlessly and cruelly removed from history textbooks. They write,

“There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way through sacred water,

and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was the apocalypse of the dogs

and the hoses…”

The repetitive syntactical structure acts as pulse for readers to follow, a heartbeat to connect anyone and everyone to each of these disasters, whether we geographically, racially, or otherwise relate. For many, the world has already ended. The world keeps ending with every brown person shot by militarized police, every meter of land unsustainably forested, every queer kid kicked out of their home. Choi guides us through time, exposing the interconnectedness of injustice, and how privileged folks need to bear witness to the stakes of their comfort.

From Section I of the collection, “Celebrate Good Times” calls out the difficulty of survival in a more nuanced way. Choi never states explicitly that the poem is about Biden’s presidential election, starting the poem with, “The regime is having a birthday party.” The following lines, however, viscerally bring me back to November of 2020, to “happy Americans honk[ing] their horns.” I was on the corner of the Boston Common watching crowds gather to cheer at cars passing by waving flags. But Choi sees through the celebrations and into the emptiness, the reality. The speaker is in her kitchen, alone, slicing an onion during this historical moment. They reflect:

“…and that’s a fine

reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empire

congratulates itself on persisting again. No, thank you,

I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finished

mourning the last tyrant yet. I haven’t said enough…”

Instead of looking ahead with relief, once again the future feels perilous because Choi can acknowledge history and its damaging, intergenerational effects. A few years after the poem was written, readers today sit stunned with Choi’s truth telling amidst countless examples of America’s complicity with the violence. We feel their sense of urgency, calling us to do more as artists and family members and neighbors. But there is also a more ancient, deeper call to weep. Hope is hard to hold when feeling bonded to all who suffer. The possibility of safe haven—in the case of this poem, with regards to America’s government—is nearly futile without radical reckoning and restructure.

The Word Keeps Ending also acknowledges Choi’s personal story within the global context. With “Rememory,” they borrow Toni Morrison’s term to explore remembering a history that is inherited, and therefore theirs even though they didn’t live it themself. The speaker tries to recall details of bayonets and rioting, of cops killing their father and students. The couplets in this poem are fairly even in length, organized, neat. But the speaker, more and more, second-guesses the scene, and especially their position in it. Unraveling, they write:

“Boots on the ground—boots? on the bloody ground? Whose voice was that. 

Whose year is it. Whose streets. This city, this our—slow bayonet of claiming,

whose tank in my mouth? Bayonet of this: American me, fathering nothing

but the wails of strangers I’ll never caress. Bayonet of dispersal, gas.

We run, choking on the sound of century and century’s return.

I run, and a country breaks its way out of me, then breaks, breaks.” 

Choi’s movement in and out of the first persona plural illustrates their oneness with the past, particularly with their father at a younger age. Ultimately, they are alone, running, carrying an entire history inside themself until it bursts out. The word “breaks” is repeated three times, not only indicating that the country is breaking itself, but also it is breaking other countries, and needed to break the speaker in order to free itself. There is so much harm committed in this poem, and all the while the speaker isn’t fully sure of their place in the memory. This unsettling feeling Choi describes is a brokenness in and of itself, a disconnect from secure perception, or from reality itself.

Within disturbance and disaster, Choi often relies on repetition as a grounding strategy. While, as mentioned, the poem “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes” uses a repeating syntax to propel the reader down the page, a later poem, “Demilitarized Zone,” employs the over-presence of one word. “Demilitarized” exists twenty-one times, and a last twenty-second time as a verb: “Together, we demilitarize my family.” Traveling to Pyeongyang, North Korea, the speaker looks to complete their family tree. Some nouns that are characterized as demilitarized are familiar, or at least feel plausibly described as such, including an airport and a train. But Choi also attaches this word to more unexpected nouns:

“On the plane, I order a demilitarized orange juice. I 

look down at the demilitarized mountains of Siberia and imagine walking on 

them. We land on the demilitarized runway, and the captain’s voice over the

loudspeaker is demiliatarized as he asks us to stay in our seats. In the bathroom, 

I brush my demilitarized teeth…”

One word remarkably defamiliarizes the land, nourishment, even the speaker’s own body. Although this poem has a specific context, its deeper content expands beyond borders. Choi writes about togetherness, family, and looking for connections between people, as well as across time. They end “Demilitarized Zone” with an image of the sun, a star that keeps every living being on earth alive. Survival and belonging act as anchors amidst apocalypse and doom throughout The World Keeps Ending, The World Goes On. Choi’s brilliant collection is fearless, truthful, and full of courage. This collection acts as alarm, necessary and ringing. But it is also a tender reminder, an symphonic orchestra of how we are all connected, which will ultimately be our collective grace.