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.

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.