“Everyday Apocalypses”: Franny Choi, Safia Elhillo, Saeed Jones & Paul Tran

Franny Choi is the author of several books, including Soft Science, Floating, Brilliant, Gone, and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is currently an Arthur Levitt Jr. Artist-in-Residence at Williams College. In her third book, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco Books), Choi offers a poetry collection for the ends of worlds – past, present, and future. There are poems about historical and impending apocalypses alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival. These poems remind us that, for marginalized peoples, the apocalypse has already come in myriad ways. They spin backward and forwards in time – from Korean comfort women during World War II and the precipice of the climate crisis to children wandering a museum in the future. As she wrestles with the daily griefs of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness could look like.

Paul Tran’s work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. Tran received their B.A. in history from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where they were the chancellor’s graduate fellow and senior poetry fellow. They have been awarded a 2021 Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. In their debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin Books), Tran investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, his work elucidates reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self. It’s an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

Saeed Jones is the author of How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir, the collection Prelude to Bruise, and the chapbook When the Only Light is Fire. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and GQ, and he has been featured on public radio, including NPR’s Fresh Air, Pop Culture Happy Hour, It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders, and All Things Considered. In the haunted poems in Alive at the End of the World (Coffee House Press), Jones strips away American artifice to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us. Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. He sees himself as an unreliable narrator, so he looks outward to understand what’s within. He calls on cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin, and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and perilously we’ve been living on top of fault lines. The end of the world is already here, and the apocalypse is a state of being.

Safia Elhillo, Sudanese by way of D.C., is the author of The January Children and Home Is Not a Country, and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, The Atlantic, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, among others, and has been translated into several languages. In the award-winning collection Girls that Never Die (One World), Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power. She writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too prolifically to ever be eradicated; and circles of women are deemed holy, and thus, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about looking to freedom and questioning [what if i will not die], [what will govern me then].