Serena Chopra, A Catalog of Future Mercies: Poems

 

Dowry death is often the murder of a wife by suicide—

hanging, drowned, self-poisoned and sleeping
in railroad tracks, her eyes slice 

blade of night train blaring
moon glazing everything 

suddenly delayed. (“In Afterimage”)

The third full-length poetry title by Seattle, Washington-based teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker, visual and performance artist Serena Chopra, following This Human (Coconut Books, 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017), is A Catalog of Future Mercies: Poems (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026), a uniquely and stunningly powerful book-length lyric exploring generational violence and abuse through the fragments of lyric journal and an assemblage of note-taking. “A fault is a lineage of catastrophe—” she writes, early on in the collection. “Tectonic rage, erosive surrender. / Rain shadows depriving land of water. / Fractured jaw of knuckled quartz. / Magma’s insidious brain. Stone / exhausted soft. // On the vulnerable plain, lightning / enrages drought. But we / can only imagine / a healthy need / for fire.” Chopra writes of her father and of mercy, of generations of family story, violence and memory, composing an emotionally vulnerable work of witness, structurally reminiscent of certain works by American poet Eleni Sikelianos, such as her hybrid/memoir You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]. The accumulated string of lyric fragment in Chopra’s poems I would also compare to the late Canadian poet Barry McKinnon’s infamous long poem of the Canadian prairie, I wanted to say something (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1976), for their shared use of lyric fragment, archival photographs and prairie landscape. “In our only photograph,” she writes in the opening section of “The Prairie Hands Me a Love for Time-Under-Vacancy,” “we wear white. // Behind us, an empty riverbed runs into the road / breathless // between us // the riverbed traces a signal. What is depletion— / A prairie, a prayer, an edge spreading.”

Chopra’s expansive, book-length lyric is one that ripples, composed as accumulations, fragment across fragment, writing a vulnerable articulation across witness and mercy; of memory, document and archaeology. Composed as a remarkable way to document for the sake of seeing through the worst to perhaps allow the possibility comprehension and forgiveness, and moving eventually beyond. “Guilt is a knot inside a knot—inside her fist,” she writes, mid-way through the book, “mine. // How to weigh a hand for its mercy. // Let them make shoes of your leather. // The rope used for balancing buckets or heaving feed or tying cattle or / of rupture ringing— // A saying, a saying, // One good ear kneading the other’s silence.”