The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On

The urgent and lyrically dynamic third collection from Choi (Soft Science) addresses intergenerational trauma and the anxieties of living in a world skating on the precipice of apocalypse. The poet is remarkably adept at capturing banal occurrences in the midst of panic, moments that are fraught with the fear of complicity: “I click purchase/ on an emergency go-bag from Amazon. When it arrives, I’ll use my teeth/ to tear open the plastic, unzip the pack stitched by girls who look like me/ but for their N95s, half a judgment day away, no evacuation plan in sight.” Her imagery is evocative and indelible: “Midnight, and my stomachs drag/ like nets through a river” and “Sliced from bone, my life hung like a jaw.” The poem “Science Fiction Poetry” employs repetition to dizzying effect as Choi lists the myriad misfortunes of capitalism and the Anthropocene, each a possible augur of the end: “Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you want to live;/ Dystopia of billionaires racing giddy to space;/ Dystopia $800 a month but the debt stays the same.” Choi’s electrifying language grips the reader from the first poem and never lets go. (Nov)