At the End of the World There Is a Pond

"In poems striking, humorous, and assured, Steven Duong turns and turns the world over again until we are seen anew. . . . The velocity and music of this book will steady you far into your days." -Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle

"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, author of Luster

"Through these poems, I find a map for how to survive various kinds of private, personal, and environmental extinction events. I find myself on the page, in a mirror with others who are still alive, who have survived, just like me." -Diana Khoi Nyugen, author of Root Fractures

"Not waving, not drowning, Steven Duong’s poems are leaps—of mind and heart, of creaturely imagination, of metamorphosis and memory." -Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poet

"Steven Duong writes with a relentless precision that could be deemed ruthless if not for an equally unending tenderness. Swimming in the aquarium core of this fluid, shimmery collection are questions of how to tend, how to make art and expansive life in a world often committed to utter unmaking. 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, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

"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, but not without recompense and hope. I am grateful for its smart, strange patterning of coronations and abdications, how the speaker is the "king of not killing / myself" and the "king of not drinking bleach," how drugs are "dethroned… with a finger" and guillotines feature in dreams. These poems may not always want to be in our world, but I always want to be in theirs." -Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

"At the End of the World There is a Pond is a momentous debut collection and a dazzling tribute to the ambivalence of living. Steven Duong is not the first writer to attend to the apocalyptic tenor of contemporary existence, but he might be the first to do it with language this exuberant, particular, and humorous. These poems delight, surprise, and dive deeply into tricky relational waters, keeping us attuned to a sparkling aliveness even as we chart the true darkness of despair. I love this book for its playfulness and its grace, its sharpness and its tenderness; as a whole, it has added new layers to my understanding of the role of literature in survival. 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, author of Judas Goat

"Steven Duong’s sparkling debut collection entices with its vision of a pond—at once a goal, yet a finale. “History is a shrine,” he writes in his gorgeous, crisp lyrics, but “sometimes a scar is neither a street/nor a story, but a hyphen, a single line.”??Duong uses his lines of poetry, playful yet tragic, smooth yet jagged, to unfold a uniquely hyphenated experience.??The external existence of America, with its pills and malls, parallels his internal quest. Son of a refugee father who fled from Vietnam, the poet seeks to understand the previous generation’s overshadowing experience. With charisma and craft, he explores his inherited contradictions—and we come with him, toward the unity of that gleaming pond." -Molly Peacock, author of The Widow's Crayon Box