Credit: Jasmine Durhal
FRANNY CHOI
Author of
The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On (Ecco, 2022)
Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019)
Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014)
Franny Choi is the author of several poetry collections, including Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing) and Soft Science (Alice James Books), winner of the Elgin Award for Science Fiction Poetry. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, the Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has received prizes from Princeton University’s Lewis Center, the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She lives and teaches in Western Massachusetts.
Books by FRANNY
The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On (Ecco, 2022)
Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub, Vulture, Time, Lambda Literary, One of Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022", NPR's 2022 "Books We Love, The Boston Globe's "Best Books of 2022", A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist
Many have called the last years dystopic. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples, and calls forth the importance of imagining what will persist in the aftermaths.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time. They look into the collective psyche of our years in the pandemic and in the throes of anti-racist uprisings, while imagining other vectors, directions, and futures. Stories of survival collide across space and time—from comfort women during the Korean War to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Throughout, Choi grapples with where the individual can fit within the strange landscapes of this apocalyptic world, with its violent and many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness—between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest—could look like.
In The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, old and new stories are put through a collider; what emerges is pure sonic energy, grounded by the complex entanglements that connect us all. The combination of the speculative imagination, playfulness, and wisdom in these poems ultimately chart new paths toward hope.
PRAISE
"Franny Choi’s poems are both of the world and transport us to another. I’ve taught her writing in multiple contexts for years. I’m thrilled to now have this new collection of her poems to savor and to share. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a luminous, jarring, and gorgeous gift. Grateful to have these poems as a compass in these times" — Mariame Kaba, author of the NYT bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us
"In their arresting poetry collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi considers the many ways in which the unthinkable has already happened for the most marginalized around the world by way of catastrophe, war, and devastation." — Time
"Franny Choi’s latest collection of poetry...neutralizes the feeling of apocalyptic panic by showing that xenophobia and brutality within an unequal society are, indeed, nothing new. Compounding the weariness of the past several years with that of the ages flies rather close to despair, but World eludes cynicism to cast generational trauma as a paean to survival." — Vulture
“It was Franny Choi who first taught me the truism that every utopia requires an attendant dystopia, and here she catalogues them both with aplomb. Choi charts a path through the gloom and ecstasy of everyday catastrophe, always more mundane than we expected. It’s dull and violent and lined with ancestral memory and mushrooms ready to forage. Anyone who has lived through the daily absurdity of disaster— which is to say, all of us— can find a home here.” — Eve L. Ewing, author of 1919 and Electric Arches
Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019)
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
praise
“Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology.”
- Publishers Weekly
”Franny Choi combines technology and poetry to stunning effect”. -BUSTLE
”These beautiful, fractal-like poems are meditations on identity and autonomy and offer consciousness-expanding forays into topics like violence and gender, love and isolation." -NYLON
Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014)
In this electrifying debut, Franny Choi leads readers through the complex landscapes of absence, memory, and identity. Beginning in loss and ending in reflective elation, Floating, Brilliant, Gone explores life as a brief impossibility, "infinite / until it isn't." Punctuated with haunting illustrations by Jess X. Snow, Choi's poems read like lucid dreams that jolt awake at the most unexpected moments.