Keynote
In ghost stories and family history, this lyrical memoir explores mercy as resistance to generational violence
Book Title
A Catalog of Future Mercies
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
Poem Excerpt
The grasses stilled in their ghosts. I cut the roots. Father cautions me
against discarding them in our flower beds—invasive species
are insistent. In vases, the prairie smells of drowned air, calcifies
the glass, rots overnight, and insists we scry the effluvium
for our morning prayer. Withered stamen, balding ovaries—how
do her petals withstand fists of storm and wind? I remove the death
and change the water, unable to discern her kind of thirsting.
—From “Invasive Species”
against discarding them in our flower beds—invasive species
are insistent. In vases, the prairie smells of drowned air, calcifies
the glass, rots overnight, and insists we scry the effluvium
for our morning prayer. Withered stamen, balding ovaries—how
do her petals withstand fists of storm and wind? I remove the death
and change the water, unable to discern her kind of thirsting.
—From “Invasive Species”
Body
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.
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