Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's an efficiency to poetry,

where if you do it right, you can say a lot with just a few words. In a bit, we'll hear from

former U.S. poet laureate, Billy Collins, about his new collection of short poetry. But first,

the efficiency of poetry works a little differently

in Frani Choi's new collection. It's called The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On. And in it,

she holds these two huge thoughts in her head at the same time with each poem. It's that

horrible things have happened to people all throughout history that amount to nothing less than catastrophe.

But also, people keep living, and that's kind of beautiful.

Choi talked to Amper's Lel-Faddle about finding a sense of morbid comfort in the tragedies of the

world.

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and visit Wise.com. T's and C's Apply. In her latest collection of poetry, Frannie Choi draws on her

family's history. Her parents immigrated to the United

States from Seoul, South Korea, just a few months before she was born. In my family history is

all of the painful parts of modern Korean history from colonization by the Japanese Empire to war

and that devastating war that decimated the peninsula and also

the division of the Koreas.

Her book is called The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On, which also happens to be the

title of one of the poems in her collection.

She says she wrote the poems to cope with the state of the world, each one a reminder of other moments in the past that were apocalyptic, just not for everyone.

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