 Ron, Dawn, Elissa and Madeline Charles in Sunnyvale, Calif., Dec. 29, 2022. (Ron Charles/The Washington Post) | Yesterday, my wife and I celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary. Yes, we fell in love as teenagers in a previous century. Being a character in the book of Dawn's life has been the best story I ever could have imagined. A year ago, a resurgence of the covid pandemic snarled our travel plans at the last minute, and this year it looked like the weather would once again keep our family pinned down and separated around the country. But we made it to the Bay Area just after Christmas, and the greatest anniversary gift is being together with our two daughters. I'm taking this week off from the newsletter, but below you'll find links to the week's book coverage and, of course, a new poem. Thanks for sharing 2022 with me. Best wishes for 2023.  Ecco | In an era too often considered apocalyptic, Franny Choi maintains a haunting tension between realism and, if not hope, resilience. The title of her new collection, "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On," was inspired by a comment her partner made after the 2016 election. "Everyone I knew was talking about the end of the world," Choi writes in a statement from her publisher. "At times, it seemed impossible to imagine we were heading toward anything else. At some point in the muck of it all, my partner turned to me and said, 'Maybe it's good to remember this: the world's ended many times before. And we've been surviving the apocalypse all this time.'" Look My mother, very Catholic, loves that song: Imagine
there's no heaven. Can you picture it?—my mother
joining the chorus of her three churchless children to croon,
no heaven, no hell, nothing before or after? Above us,
only the universe and its borderless yawn. Only the trees
who died for my handwriting, history's pollen, fields
and field hands I can't stop robbing with money.
Today, I woke up on still-stolen land, then scrolled
through the latest debris of people attempting godliness
in a hundred wrong ways. The room was filled today
with light; filled, you could say, with nothing. No hope,
no glory. No such peach as an ethical peach.
The minute I started wanting paradise, it leapt
from my belief. I'm not good enough to survive
not being good. I'm like you—still drooling
after a perfect world, even as the stars warble
off-key and the oceans rattle with plastics.
Imagine, I can't stop saying. Imagine, I beg,
when I should have said, Look: paradise
is both a particle and a wave. You don't have
to believe in something for it to startle you awake. From "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On," by Franny Choi. Copyright © 2022 by Franny Choi, reprinted by permission of Ecco, a division of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Many thanks to all the poets and their publishers who have generously allowed me to feature their poems in this newsletter throughout the year. Please let them know you appreciate it by buying their collections with abandon. Send any questions or comments about the Book Club to ron.charles@washpost.com. You can read last week's issue here. Please tell friends who might enjoy this free newsletter that they can get it every week by clicking here. See you next year!
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