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)

In an interview with the Iowa Review, Choi speaks of the poems in her earlier collection Soft Science as having a longing for intimacy with others, with the earth, and with her own self. This longing to connect is present in her current collection, but it's fused with a powerful apocalyptic sense of a world gone wrong. The poems are also shaped by her experiences as a Korean American poet living in a diaspora between the two countries and not fitting into either. Toughly taking on a world "ruled eternally/ by the car-hearted and walnut-brained," she further mourns "I have two degrees/ and couldn't save anyone, couldn't have saved a dog" in free-verse poems that approach the metaphysical. Choi's use of alliteration, enjambment, and repetition lend a chantlike feel to her work, which tends toward overstatement while ending with a metaphor that makes the rest of the poem seem almost like a haiku. One of the best poems, "Look," turns the idea of spirituality on its head: "My mother, very Catholic, loves that song: 'Imagine/ there's no heaven…no hell, nothing before or after?'" The poet, herself a nonbeliever, can still be startled and awakened, which (if nothing else) is the point of life--and poetry. VERDICT A collection that will startle readers.--Diane Scharper