The World Doesn't End

The World Doesn't End gathers short prose poems, most no longer than a paragraph, each one a small, self contained scene rather than a poem broken into lines. Charles Simic populates these paragraphs with a recurring cast: butchers, insomniacs, fortune tellers, stray dogs wandering empty squares at night, and gods who show up disguised as ordinary people, figures drawn as much from Eastern European folk tale as from anything specifically autobiographical. The pieces read like fragments of dream or fable, compressed almost to the point of riddle, often ending on an image that reframes everything that came before it rather than on a stated conclusion.

Simic writes out of a childhood spent in wartime Belgrade, where his family was forced to evacuate their home more than once to escape bombing before he immigrated to the United States as a teenager, and that displaced, half remembered Europe surfaces throughout the book even when no poem states it directly. The prose form itself was part of the book's statement: writing in paragraphs rather than lines let Simic fold in a storyteller's momentum, the sense of a folk tale being told aloud, that his earlier, more compressed lyric poems did not have room for.

Reading The World Doesn't End means accepting short prose blocks as poems in their own right rather than as poetry's more casual cousin, an argument the book makes simply by being good enough to win poetry's most prominent American prize. It suits a reader who enjoys surreal, darkly funny miniatures, comfortable with a book that treats a butcher's shop or an empty square at midnight as ready made material for something close to myth.