A Catalog of Future Mercies - by Serena Chopra (Paperback)

About the Book

In ghost stories and family history, this lyrical memoir explores mercy as resistance to generational violence

Book Synopsis

In ghost stories and family history, this lyrical memoir explores mercy as resistance to generational violence

In this luminous memoir-in-poems, Serena Chopra explores the complexities of mercy in an immigrant family haunted by generational violence. Drawing connections between the brutalized prairie beneath suburban lawns and the brutalized body seeking reclamation through sensuality, Chopra examines what it means to be a survivor descended from both survivors and perpetrators. Through divinatory poetics and cross-temporal storytelling, she parallels national histories of violence with the paradox of caretaking for a parent who has been both victim and abuser. And, in the specters of generational violence, Chopra invokes an imperative to stay present with lineages of trauma rather than slip into personal and cultural amnesia. A lyric woven in four parts, A Catalog of Future Mercies reimagines mercy as radical embodied witnessing, a form of resilience that refuses the tyranny of forgetting.

Review Quotes

"Swelling with sumptuous eros, Serena Chopra's poems offer us a new way to understand the queer, femme body coming into gorgeous, gristled collision with familial history. As perhaps only a dancer can, Chopra takes the muscle of music to memories that most minds refuse outright, and has excavated the most tender song from the shatter and thunder of violence. Chopra has urged the hardest questions about domestic violence in immigrant communities out from hiding, and her poems guide us, with vigilant tenderness, out of hardened habits of witness and into fuller, more daring compassion. A Catalog of Future Mercies emerges into our world at a time of recoil and horror to change how we address our untended capacity for forgiveness. It invites us to contemplate that urgent, grand human feeling: mercy. And it has been made with transformative, and transforming, courage."--Divya Victor, author of CURB

About the Author

Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver and has received support from the NEA, MacDowell, Kundiman, and Fulbright. She is the author of This Human and Ic.