A Catalog of Future Mercies : Poems

In this luminous poetic memoir, Serena Chopra explores the complexities of mercy and cyclical violence in an immigrant family. Drawing connections between the brutalized prairie beneath suburban lawns and the brutalized body seeking reclamation through sensuality, Chopra examines what it means to survive, to love and care for a parent who has been both victim and abuser. Through divinatory poetics and cross-temporal storytelling, she grapples with national histories of violence and the imperative to stay present with lineages of traumas rather than slip into personal and cultural amnesia. A three-dimensional tapestry that constellates meaning through ecstatic repetition and rearrangement, A Catalog of Future Mercies reimagines mercy as radical embodied witnessing, a form of resilience that refuses the tyranny of forgetting.