Calamity can cohabit with joy, and you and I have, on some plane, accepted that absurd reality. We are living in a dystopia: Some of us can enjoy a day out with loved ones, and on our way to our warm homes, pass homeless people as if they are merely set pieces that make up the outside world. At a party, out of habit, we might check Twitter only to see another place that has been bombed, the news wedged between a funny meme and celebrity gossip, and keep scrolling until another post shows up about children with cancer. Then, something else might distract us, making it seem as if we hadn't read about these things at all. Other times, we live our own nightmares while no one around us bears witness to them, yet we somehow survive.

Franny Choi's poetry collection The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a compilation of meditations investigating the line between destruction and ...