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The End of the World Isn’t New and Neither Is the Work Ahead of Us

On Franny Choi’s poetry

Essays | Franny Choi, future, poetry
February 5, 2025

I first read Franny Choi’s poetry collection The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On the day after the 2022 midterm elections. Sitting in my home in Florida, I waited for news from county officials regarding which offices would remain open in anticipation of a rare November hurricane. What I knew that morning: that schools would be closing for the storm, that the courts were undecided, that the Florida governor would remain the same governor, which meant—and still means—that when I want to see my family, I can’t invite them to my home, home being entirely within the jurisdiction of border control, an area demarcated in relation to the coastline that encroaches inward each year. 

On Election Day this past fall, I watched news updates for yet another historic November hurricane (only four have made landfall in the United States since the 1850s) as I spoke on the phone with poet Annie Wenstrup discussing what we felt capable of doing that morning. We both live in rural-adjacent areas that, within our geographies, are significant cities (Wenstrup lives in Alaska). I’d gone on my run that passes my assigned polling location, and she’d gone into town for errands. We’d each tried to gauge what it meant to see different faces rallying at our respective intersections, and what that might mean for local amendments and budgetary measures that were on the ballot. We were both rereading Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, not for comfort, but for perspective and for the reminder that the end of the world isn’t new.

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022) is Choi’s third full-length poetry collection, their follow-up to Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019). As with her earlier work, Choi’s engagement with the speculative is grounded not only in the lyric but the theoretical, engaging with works like Donna J. Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women and Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism. These are poems that reject a linear history. Instead, the archive and the present overlap and are pressed to the poem, which, like a black hole, according to some theories, disintegrates an object on its horizon only to manifest it again in the future. The climate apocalypse of the present, the failures of the state to recognize human rights in the present—these become refrains of the apocalypse of World War II and, before that, the invention of the settler-colonial state, human bondage, tiered citizenship. 

Reading The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, I’m constantly reminded that “apocalypse” sounds like but doesn’t mean “collapse.” It comes from the same root as “to uncover” or “reveal,” the work most familiar to me as a poet. Through stories I’ve inherited from my family, through Choi’s work, I’ve come to see the apocalypse reveals what we must seek liberation from and how we survive.


In Choi’s title poem, apocalypse is an enduring refrain, something to go back to, something to anticipate, something that stays with us. As the poem names the everyday apocalypses, apocalypse sounds like but doesn’t mean collapse: “the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses. Border fence / apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse.” Each is an apocalypse with a different function. A colony of bees collapses. But the collapse of the border fence might make home more feasible. Choi’s list creates tension in the distinction between that which is lost and that which instigates loss. When we revisit the border apocalypse in “Things That Already Go Past Borders,” Choi describes the border as a permeable construct, already giving way for “trade deals; pathogens; specific / passports; particular skill sets” and for people too, though as people, we must navigate the power structures that at times are their own harbingers of the apocalypse.

Essential to the contemporary apocalypse is the historic understanding of the atomic apocalypse as both the end of the world and the end of World War II. Opening the collection’s second section, Choi’s “Process Note” explores World War II’s impact on contemporary narratives through “a half-century-plus of annihilative paranoia and very confusing novels” or more succinctly “the end of narrative.” Choi also introduces the end of the world as “the prelude to liberation—the beginning of the end, that is, of the control, carnage, forced labor, and cultural genocide that raped, enslaved and killed millions of Koreans, Indonesians, Taiwanese and others.” It’s a historical lens—a “postwar” lens that cannot be framed as “post-” but the beginning of multiple Asian countries becoming independent of colonial powers. 

In my own family, my nanay describes the period between the end of World War II and the beginning of martial law in the Philippines in 1972 as a time when the Philippine peso was worth half a dollar. She had just opened her own business selling rice. She was active in local politics, and even in the face of martial law, she believed in her vote. She marched frequently and with such confidence that she brought her children with her. This might sound like nostalgia, but as Choi points out, this period of history was only the precursor to apocalypses to come. During this time in the Philippines, for example, Ferdinand Marcos’s twenty-year rule set the groundwork for decades of corrupt politicians, human rights crises, and crushing national debt. 

To return to my nanay’s sequence of events in the aftermath of World War II is to admit my own exhaustion when I recognize the similarities between one rising fascist regime and another, be that the Marcos dynasty’s continuance with President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. or Trump’s creation of the Department of Government Efficiency. And yet it’s the language from the EDSA 1986 People Power Revolution—the popular demonstrations on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) in Manila that led to the fall of Marcos—that has shaped my own belief in poetry and rhetoric. My family still lives right off of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, so any story about home at some point becomes a story about revolution. Maybe this stems from my limited Tagalog, but as a child I would latch onto my uncle’s quotes from Juan Ponce Enrile, who attempted to overthrow Marcos in 1986, on Radio Veritas. “Mr. President … Do not miscalculate our strength now,” my uncle would proclaim in between selling candies and sodas at our sari-sari. For me, a whole movement existed in a sound bite, an echo transmitted from one generation to the next.

Choi also knows the revolutionary power of a sound bite. In The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, they return again and again to sound, both as a function of speech (“how to speak to any one in a history like this”) and as “sonics” outside of language (“phonemes holy as stones on a string”). This is the most obvious truth—that we must understand one another to survive. In “Aaron Says the World Is Upside Down,” a poem about protests against the murder of George Floyd, however, Choi goes further in exploring the scale of our immediate ability to communicate:

of saying a thing in unison so clear it drills a hole through to the other
side of what’s possible, so clear and wholly inverted, we realize it’s been here
all along: O kingdom of fire, O kingdom of food, with the same mouth
we take your blessings; with the same mouth we pronounce you come.

When we read this poem aloud, we can imagine a kind of unity, holding the “O” open “with the same mouth” as the speaker. And yet, what we recite doesn’t mean the same thing for each of us. In her essay “Racism Is a Reboot: Binging Battlestar Galactica at the End of a World,” Choi visits this same moment where “the cops are shooting rubber bullets at even the blonde / journalists” from another angle. She names the thing protesters said in unison, but also the fracture within that unifying sound bite: “Aside from the protestors’ masks, the photos from Minneapolis in 2020 looked eerily like the photos of Ferguson in 2014. We chanted the same chants as we had then, and I reencountered the strangeness of watching white people shout, ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’” As someone who may at times be white-passing, I acknowledge how unlikely it is I would ever have to speak this sentence alone.

Throughout the collection, readers take on the role of the auditor. They must listen and judge a personal proximity to the collective “we” that demands liberation. Choi’s poems call for participation in the tradition of Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, which offers specific directions about how to engage in collective action, while exploring how language, too, may bring us closer to lasting social change. I love how Choi pushes their readers towards difficult sounds, a tongue twister at the end of the alphabet—the y’s and u’s and w’s that fill “We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had” bring us close to the end and yet not to the end itself. The sentence that ends this poem stops twice before it finishes. It fractures rather than completes: 

& holey, porous. meanwhile tide still tide.
& we: still washed for sounds to mark. & marked. 

Choi makes us question the integrity of the sentence first in structure, then in content. In “Protest Poem” she writes: 

No one could have told me
I was possible
with a sentence
that would have made it
true. So: this isn’t
a sentence.
It’s a sound.

What (and who) can be imagined within the language we have? Choi makes clear that the information the sentence is capable of conveying is incomplete, unable to conceive the speaker.  And yet the poem is constructed of more than sentences—“It’s a sound,” which Choi reminds us has shape and consequences. Unlike written language, a sound is bodily. It has a form and can manifest as “a wave / that stutters / at the air until / the plate glass / cracks.” A poem may utilize the sentence, but it exists in the body. And perhaps this distinction is necessary because of what we have made of the sentence—both as a syntactical unit and as a judgment—at this particular end of the world. 


On Election Day last year, my partner and I delayed voting, because we live in a country where the courts schedule trials on Election Day and my partner, who is a lawyer, had a trial that day. Along with the jury, the state prosecution, the judge, and his defendant, my partner had to await a verdict, a verdict that might also demand a sentence. 

This is not an uncommon way to consider the sentence in America, a country where nearly half the population has experienced a close family member’s incarceration. The sentence is a judgment and the cost of absolution, though even after absolution, the sentence will follow us because the record of any sentence is more durable and transmutable than the body. The state may release a person but will maintain the record of their sentence—even, as in Choi’s “How to Let Go of the World,” when the body is placed into danger as a result of the sentence, a reality emphasized by the most recent election cycle in which a measure to ban forced prison labor failed to remove slavery from the California constitution. In the poem, Choi writes:

I can listen to the sound of a boy describe how holding a line against fire might cut time off his sentence. I can hold his voice in my hands and whisper straight into it, but that doesn’t make him here. I can love and love his arms helping mine make something other than dirt and watch that love bleed straight into the space between us and then of course. It falls. Into a tunnel and gone.

The sentence becomes a border we cannot cross, a one-way transmission that separates the sentenced body from sound and from “here,” a shared and present space. But the poem is also a vehicle for amending the sentence, which Choi cuts short. Choi divides and disperses the structure as “It falls. Into a tunnel and gone” so that the sentence fragments, perhaps in place of the body the speaker seeks to protect. 

So let us go back to the record, and to Choi’s collection as a written record, a sequence of words and events that reform memory, as with “Poem in Place of a Poem.” In the poem, Choi is frank about who they are accountable to while writing this collection. Within the poem, they write about another poem, which described an encounter their mother had with the police when the speaker was younger. They have set that poem aside in order to respect their mother’s autonomy. Instead they write: 

In the memory, no grammar
I can wave at the cop
is enough to keep her safe.)
I need the story, I say, to explain.
Why I’m writing about this.
She ends the call crying.
The sound, a hole
where the word might go … 

To say that the early record failed the mother, to say that the mother’s protest (against the original poem) is part of the record, is also to acknowledge that the poet cannot merely replicate the dehumanizing record of the state. In place of the first poem and state evidence of this encounter, Choi presents a speaker who can and does change the record. While the action of the poem is the same, the mother’s volition, in this version, takes effect. This poem must retell the story under new constraints. The poem is not concerned with repeating the grammar the cop will not understand. Instead, the poem focuses on the speaker’s need for pretext and the mother’s need for omission. In both contexts, the speaker extends the record to make room for “someone me-like.” Choi has surgically stretched the past to the point that it is a malleable medium. 

When we reach the poem “Demilitarized Zone,” Choi’s verse is itself a kind of record. It documents state acknowledgement of the speaker and her ability to represent a much larger lineage, including the names of family members she has memorized and written down and carried to the border between North and South Korea:

We turn to the last generation recorded before the world ended and our line split south. I unfold my paper with the list of missing names. The clerk copies the letters as I read them. Together, we demilitarize my family. The sun coming in through the windows says, ah. ah.

The sun appears in nine poems within The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. In comparison, the apocalypse appears in three poems. Catastrophe in four. The end of the world happens three times, the sun continues to warm the earth, and the speaker continues in large and small efforts, to imagine how we might build a future together. 

Choi’s collection constructs the world we hope to engender and offers actionable ways towards the future. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is its own “prelude to liberation,” offering accountability practices and revisions towards future generations who might “thank you for healing / what you could; for passing down what you couldn’t.” 


The morning after elections last year, I asked my great aunt, Nena Gajudo Fernandez, how she continued to write during Philippine martial law. Tita Nena told me, “Be brave and stay safe,” and she reminded me that writing is a byproduct of other work. During martial law she went underground. She organized so that my nanay would have someone to vote for.

My great aunt’s advice seems to align with how Choi’s poems reflect their constant work as a community activist. They’re the founder of Brew & Forge, which organizes book fairs, lectures, and retreats for writers and artists dedicated to liberation, justice, and survival. One of the first blurbs for Choi’s collection is not from a poet but from Dr. Connie Wun, whose work is focused on abolition and who is the cofounder of AAPI Women Lead.

Choi’s vision of the future recalls the past without nostalgia, shows love for the unrelenting aspects of the world (foremost of which is light, earthly and otherwise) and carries them with us into its aftermath, which is still full of potential. If her future-vision is imperfect, if it leans towards fragmentation, then it is sustained by an ability to love, safeguard, and gather those who came before us and those who will love after us. 

In imagining a future speaker not unlike herself, Choi closes the distance between memory and the present. She does so by reclaiming “a growing list of other things that are unrelenting: teenagers piling rollicking into the street. The shock of a citrus sky in midwinter. The way a phrase’s shape can hook itself through your lip for weeks.” Unrelenting, in this context, meaning enduring and also a continuation into future action so that we may allow ourselves to grieve what we have. And what we miss. And what we hope for.