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
“Serena Chopra is an orb weaver connecting generations-old fault lines in India with the roots of the grasses in Colorado prairies. These lines, pages, images comprise a glittering web. . . . It is heartbreaking to witness and in doing so, I found that I, too, learned to braid hope alongside the speaker.”—Diana Khoi Nguyen
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”
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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About the Author
Credit: Tesha Zietlow
Praise
“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. A Catalog of Future Mercies guides us out of hardened habits of witness and into fuller, more daring compassion.”—Divya Victor
