The Invisible Dog Art Center is thrilled to welcome Books Are Magic for The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On with Noah Arhm Choi, Aracelis Girmay, Sarah Kay, & José Olivarez
From acclaimed and beloved 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 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.
Franny Choi is the author of two previous poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), as well as one chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a recipient of Princeton University’s Holmes National Poetry Prize, and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and their cat.
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom, the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. They received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and their work appears in Barrow Street, Blackbird, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Split this Rock and others. Noah was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the 2021 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and Associate Director of DEI at a school in New York City. For more information, visit noaharhmchoi.com or @noah.arhm.choi on Instagram.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016), for which she was a finalist for the 2018 Neustadt Prize. Her recent work has been published in Astra, The Massachusetts Review, and The Paris Review online. Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (2020). With her sister she collaborated on the picture book What Do You Know? (2021) and another picture book collaboration with the artist Diana Ejaita will be out in 2023 (both with Enchanted Lion). She lives and teaches in Brooklyn.
Sarah Kay is a writer, performer, and educator from New York City. She has shared her poems in over thirty countries, from cornfields in Iowa to an orthodontist office in Nepal; a viking ship on a fjord in Norway, a town square in Estonia, a nightclub in India, the Royal Danish Theatre in Denmark, Carnegie Hall in New York City, the Kennedy Center in DC, the back rooms of dive-bars, middle school gymnasiums, and once on top of someone’s dining room table. Sarah has a masters degree in the art of teaching from Brown University and has been a Hedgebrook Writer in Residence, a Serenbe Artist in Residence, a New America Fellow, and a Kundiman Fellow. She is the author of four books of poetry: B, No Matter the Wreckage, The Type, and All Our Wild Wonder. Sarah is the founder and co-director of Project VOICE, an organization that uses poetry to entertain, educate, and empower students and educators worldwide.
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. His second book of poems, Promises of Gold, will be published in February 2023.
Admission
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Location
The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen St.
Event guidelines:
All guests must be vaccinated to attend, and must provide proof of vaccination with either Excelsior Pass or vaccination card in order to enter event.
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