Steven Duong – At the End of the World There Is a Pond In-store Reading and Signing
Sunday, Jan 26, 2025 3:00 PM
Location:
A Cappella Books
208 Haralson Avenue, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30307
A stunning debut volume infused with apocalyptic overload, beginnings and endings, and all the ways we betray ourselves.
A Cappella Books welcomes Atlanta poet Steven Duong for a special afternoon reading and book signing in honor of his debut poetry collection, "At the End of the World There Is a Pond."
This event is free and open to the public; copies of the book will be available for purchase.
About the Book
"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, Steven 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?
About the Author
Steven Duong is the 2023–2025 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. His poems and short stories have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Drift, Guernica, and The Best American Short Stories 2024. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
