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A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Steven Duong in celebration of his debut poetry collection, At The End of The World There is a Pond, to be joined by our very own bookseller, Mira Braneck.About the book
"'The Anthropocene,' Steven Duong writes, 'demands a new syntax'; what might it be? His answer: poems like ghost story manifestos tweeted out into the void; verse in which the spectral presence of Vietnamese fathers and refugee mothers hangs heavy overhead, ever-present and ever-calling; a collection in which their young American offspring, self-dubbed the 'king of not killing myself,' reigns over his domain of Oxycod*ne and Molotov cocktails at the collapse of empire. His answer is this book, a trickster's debut about loving and surviving (against all odds, against yourself, against your worst impulses made manifest) through the end of the world.
'when the markets fall & the workers
pop their bubbly
I will die old
poet laureate
of wherever they find me'
And so I ask you, dear reader: let the guillotine spare our newfound poet laureate, syntax-monarch-turned-aquarium-revolutionary, so he may follow this first book with a second and third and fourth, and so we may read them all while the champagne flows and the workers of the world, having united and at long last arrived at the better world ahead, can sit back and relax, beloveds by their side and At the End of the World There Is a Pond in hand."
— Mira
Steven Duong is the 2023–2025 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. His poems and short stories have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Drift, Guernica, and The Best American Short Stories 2024. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Mira Braneck is a writer and bookseller. She lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is the receiving manager and books to prisoners program coordinator at A Room of One's Own.
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