Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness by Franny Choi
Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness
Franny ChoiLord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun.
I answered the phone, and a channel opened
between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness
stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet.
O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then:
you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment;
you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade
And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin.
I get closer to open air; true north.Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face,
does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort
if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press
your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me,
but just so—just so I can almost see your face—
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi, published by Ecco, 2023. (Available direct from Ecco • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick
One of: Time’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2022” * NPR’s 2022 “Books We Love” Vulture’s “10 Best Books of 2022”
A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist
From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time–from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, 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. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness–between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest–could look like. Bringing together Choi’s signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.” (Source)
ABOUT FRANNY CHOI
Franny Choi is the author of the poetry collections Soft Science (Alice James, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), as well as the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a recipient of Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize and a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, as well as fellowships from Kundiman, VONA, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work has… (more)
Read more poems by Franny Choi • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Twitter • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: transformation • faith • catastrophe • Or browse the index
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