Acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s first new offering since Soft Science, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a meditation on historical, present-day and impending apocalypses, which notes how dystopia has already been the reality for marginalized people. Lyrical and personal yet universally resonant, this insightful and elegant poetry collection trudges through catastrophe to imagine collective survival.
Franny Choi explores queerness, femininity, identity and autonomy as an Asian American woman in Soft Science, a book of poems that often center on futurism and technology in a remarkably human manner. While cyborgs feature as a vehicle for otherness, Choi also uses them in many other nuanced ways. Rhythmic and melodic, her poems enthrall readers.
A portrait through poetry of a trans person’s experience, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch runs powerful, emotion-laden language through moments of trauma, tenderness and joy. Candrilli’s accolades—as a 2019 Whiting Award Winner in poetry, a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry, and many more—are deserved, and this latest 96-page book further reveals their distinct, necessary voice.
