Steven Duong - "At the End of the World There is a Pond" - Anna Tuchin

Steven Duong will discuss At the End of the World There is a Pond. He will be joined in conversation by Anna Tuchin. A Q&A will follow after the signing. 

At the Seminary Co-op. 

RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required). 

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?

"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

About the author: Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego, California. He is the author of At the End of the World There is a Pond (W. W. Norton, 2025). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Guernica, and the Yale Review, among other publications, and his short fiction is published in Catapult, The Drift, and The Best American Short Stories 2024. The recipient of fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, Kundiman, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

About the interlocutor: Anna Tuchin is a Chicago-based writer and educator with an MFA from the University of California, Davis. Her writing has been supported by Tin House and Writing by Writers. Currently, she is working on a short story collection about the ambiguous borders between our bodies and our technologies. She loves the book At the End of the World There Is a Pond by Steven Duong.