Join First Light Books on Tuesday, June 10, to celebrate the release of Steven Duong's debut poetry collection, AT THE END OF THE WORLD THERE IS A POND.

Tickets include a copy ofAT THE END OF THE WORLDand a reserved seat at the event. Reserved seating is limited, and any unreserved standing room will be available on a first-come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

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'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 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 a writer from San Diego, California. He is the author of the debut poetry collection, At the End of the World There Is a Pond (W. W. Norton, 2025). His writing appears in the American Poetry Review, The Best American Short Stories 2024, The Drift, Guernica, the New England Review, Protean Magazine, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University and an editor of short fiction at Joyland Magazine. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Steven will be joined in conversation by First Light Member Nitya Rayapati. Nitya is a fiction writer and translator from Austin. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been a Periplus fellow.