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 Franey 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.

Troy talked to Amper's Lelopheidel about finding a sense of morbid comfort in the tragedies of the world.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.

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