Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Fuel
By Franny Choi
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2022! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 15 through November 15 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 13-20, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2022.
Somewhere in a prior world, a woman with my face is scraping the seeds from an unborn hell. All night, doom rang from the sky. And in the morning, there are mouths to feed. There are crocks in the cellar and the ruined crops, the early frost, the neighbor’s red daughter strung up in the square. What else to do when the unspeakable comes. What to burn when it doesn’t. Somewhere in a world that didn’t quite end, a woman like me is foraging for that which failed to kill her. She is cranking open modernity’s throat, wrenching her arc from its scat. She is a woman who can hack an impossible morning into water, bean paste, bitter leaves, another chance to fumble toward the next chance, and the next— Every day of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.
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.
From THE WORLD KEEPS ENDING, AND THE WORLD GOES ON: Poems by Franny Choi. Copyright © 2022 by Franny Choi. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
**We do our best to preserve the integrity of each poem; however, due to programming limitations, some poems may read differently on a mobile phone and in certain browsers. For best viewing, use Chrome on a desktop/laptop.
So many unspeakably brilliant lines here!