The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

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.