At the end of the world
there is a pond
At the End of the World There Is a Pond is a book about aftermaths.
Each poem comes in the wake of a deep rupture—the ruptures of mental illness and addiction, of migration and displacement, of violence, familial conflict, and ecological catastrophe—and yet the speakers engage with despair and playfulness in equal measure, always allowing humor, irony, and the exuberance of contemporary life to bend darkness toward something like hope.
Again and again, Duong’s writing excavates the unnatural conditions of a seemingly natural world, asking us to pay studied attention to its inhabitants. His poems force us to keep looking: at the betta fish trapped in its mason jar, the forest choked by invasive kudzu, the elephant wounded in a landmine blast.
Through its relentless scrutiny and exacting care, this magisterial debut collection poses an impossible question: how can we reconcile a deep love for the world, in all its buzzing, wriggling aliveness, with an equally deep, self-destructive desire to leave it behind?
Praise for Pond
“Duong’s poetry is surprising and alive, expansive in its treatment of longing, history, and what it means to render art from experience.”
Raven Leilani
“Duong teaches me that humor is another form of grace, that formal dexterity is nothing without emotional depth, and that love is perhaps not enough, yet still worth striving, diving, singing for.”
Chen Chen
“I am grateful for Steven Duong's At the End of the World There Is a Pond, a brilliant book that is equal parts torment and torpor… These poems may not always want to be in our world, but I always want to be in theirs.”
Natalie Shapero
“In poems, striking, humorous, assured, Steven Duong turns and turns the world over again until we are seen anew… This is poetry from a teeming intellect deserving of our most serious attention. The velocity and music of this book will steady you far into your days.”
Major Jackson
“Winsome, finely wrought, funny, and profound, At the End of the World There Is a Pond is terrific company for the tumult of all times.”
Gabrielle Bates
“These poems wiggle and wink within the very forms they’ve inhabited and mastered, never haute nor cliché… At times, Duong’s verses can feel so nimble that they seem to jailbreak from their forms altogether.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“The fish stand in for conflicts of all sorts: familial, ecological, migratory, creative. It is a contemplation of the poet's relationship to these conflicts that drive this debut collection, in a work that is witty, declarative, probing, and a bit sad.”
New York Public Library
“Duong’s debut signals a new direction for Asian American poetry.... His mastery of formal experimentation, combined with a keen cultural and ecological awareness, marks Duong as a poet of rigor and insight.”
The Adroit Journal
“One pole of Duong’s artistry is uncontainable abandon… The other pole is a painstaking formalism, a commitment to steadfastness and sobriety, as in his sonnets, which boast tattoo-precise lines and the willful sturdiness of gravestones…”
Literary Hub
“Steven Duong’s debut collection… contains poems in which wit rubs up against bleak reality. And somehow that feels like a chance for survival in a world riven by war, racism and environmental destruction.”
The Washington Post Book Club
At the End of the World There Is a Pond is out now with W. W. Norton! You can purchase it from your local bookstore or your online book retailer of choice.