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.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with chaun webster

chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work contends with the spatial, temporal, and interpretive limitations of writing and of the English language with its incapacity to represent blackness outside of regimes of death and dying. He is the author of the hybrid creative nonfiction collection Without Terminus: untraining an archive (2026), and the poetry collections Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (2023) and Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (2018), both of which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Webster’s work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Obsidian, Brink Literary Journal,  LitHub, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Angel City Review, Tilted House, and Social Text. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don't know that I would say that my first book changed my life.  It was a book of poetry that was thinking about black place and black placelessness, the organized dispossession of material and memory.  I think my perspective changed as and after writing it, specifically, I think I became more critical of the limits of the discursive as a response to material force.  My most recent work definitely has the mark of that first book and the strategies I was using, I'd just say that almost a decade later I am now more sure of myself and methods, especially my use of ambiguity, and abstraction.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry by way of the black pentecostal church.  The passionate oratory of the sermons, the repetition within the music, the hum and moan all moved me deeply and marked me in the way I consider sound and breath and return in my own writing.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The length of a project depends, oftentimes I am not always even sure of if what I am doing IS a project.  I am just trying to be present and attentive with the questions that vibrate for me, I'm trying to stay with them, I'm trying to see how they bloom.  Sometimes this becomes a project, sometimes that takes years as it did with Without Terminus.  I'd definitely say that writing is a slow process for me, but the gathering by way of note taking is very much a part of that writing process. 

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I'd say I'm a collector.  I am constantly collecting language, and images, and methods along the way and not knowing how I will use them right away.  I'll see a video about how a visual artist uses the xerox photo transfer, and then a year later read an essay about disarticulation and will see a connection and will write something, but the notes are foundational.  I'm definitely not working on a book from the beginning.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings definitely provide information about the work.  How I want to experiment with its sound, how it resonates.  I'm testing things in performance.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There are definitely theoretical concerns behind my writing.  How, as Frank B. Wilderson III asks, "does one narrate the loss of loss?" He asks this with regard to black people, the way our loss exceeds a linear teleology, does not have a resolution as might be conceived in narrative.  So how do I approach this problem as a writer? when many times the impulse is to make something known or visible through language, to bring it into coherence.  This also ties to questions I have about the archive, about how we make claims about the past, what we understand to be evidence.  I don't have many answers, much of my process is just being attentive to the questions.  

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I'm not sure what the role of the writer is in larger culture.  I think the way we may have looked at the public intellectual a generation ago has shifted, and I'm less interested in what it might mean for my work to ascend and speak to truth to power, than to echo horizontally from below.  

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It's definitely both difficult and essential to work with an editor in my experience.  I could not have done the necessary work on Without Terminus without my brilliant editors.  And it was so so hard.  

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
To "look where it ain't." Acknowledgements here to Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think I've always been moving between genres, even while writing poetry, and that is not something I find difficult or even necessarily innovative on my part, it's a part of an ongoing conversation with Jean Toomer's Cane, and Audre Lorde's Zami, and Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, and John Edgar Wideman's Fanon, and Alexis Pauline Gumb's M Archive, and Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes, and Dionne Brand's The Blue Clerk and Renee Gladman's TOAF, fahima ife's maroon choreography and none of these books are just one thing, and this list could go on forever.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have four kids, and teach during the academic year, and raise chickens, and work in my garden and read when I can find quiet space during the day, and am taking notes always, and just trying to be present.  So, my process is not structured around a number of hours I have of unbroken writing, it's a slow accretion of close observations.  

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled, I go back to Renee Gladman, to James Baldwin, and Morrison, there are others too, but Gladman's Plans for Sentences, Baldwin's Go Tell it On The Mountain, and Morrison's Beloved, the magic of those three book's sentences can lift me from anywhere.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Home is a complicated term for me.  But there is a memory I have with my nana, that showed up as a recurring dream where I am picking at her moles in the backseat of her Volkswagon and I could distinctly smell smoke and the sweetness of apples.  

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music and visual art deeply influence my work.  I wrote Without Terminus while listening to Moses Sumney on repeat, and the paintings of Caroline Kent, the drawings of Renee Gladman, the memory art of Naida Awad.  So much art outside of literary art marks the work I do.   

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I'm gonna lift up Mirene Arsanios' The Autobiography of a Language.  Ever since I read that book in a seminar course a few years ago it has lived inside my mind.  

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd love to time travel, barring that I'd love to see a whale.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
If I could pick any occupation, it would be an horologist, or clockmaker.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know if I'd say anything made me write, but it is now a part of the condition of my living. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Salvage: Readings From The Wreck by Dionne Brand.  

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm currently working on a book length essay on madness, and blackness and glossolalia.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

chaun webster, Without Terminus

i am the grandchild and great grandchild of rail workers. both of them porters of the sleeping car, both of them having demands placed up their bodies that interdicted their rest. during their employment they were both suspended in the irony of the sleeping car, which stole their ability to sleep, that robbery of rest a down payment for the ease of white train passengers. it is a familiar formula. i am trying to extend the sentences that arrived to me from my mother, and later the railroad’s archive, extend them into a different kind of exhaustion and limit point, to see where their lines fracture and whether ii can step into the space made by their splitting. i am attempting to insert the curvature of the comma into the sentence and line, a speculative practice emerging from a desire to converse with ghosts.

I’m deeply impressed by American poet chaun webster’s debut work of nonfiction, the remarkable Without Terminus (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026), a book that follows on the heels of the author’s two Minnesota Book Award-winning poetry titles—GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime (Noemi Press, 2018) and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (Black Ocean, 2023)—both of which I’m a bit frustrated at not having seen. As the back cover offers: “chaun webster traces how anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance. He begins with his grandfather Reginald, a Pullman porter who was denied rest and a pension, and follows Reginald and the train into a gloriously wayward exploration of comportment and confinement, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, and his relationships with his mother and child. Pushing sentences to their limits and troubling the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach.”

It is interesting how webster articulates and utilizes the archive, history and family history in a way comparable to the work of American poet Susan Howe [see my piece on Howe's latest here]: offering narrative threads and extended sequences, layerings of visual collage and an otherwise poetic structure. As well, this is a title that connects directly (inadvertently, I’m sure) to Calgary writer Suzette Mayr, through her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022). Through Mayr’s fiction, she writes of R.T. Baxter, a Queer, Black man in 1929 working as a sleeping car porter on a train that moves across Canada, including the prairie provinces. webster’s narrative writes of a maternal grandfather known predominantly through family story and the archive, who also worked as a sleeping car porter, across the American Midwest, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “a mass of stories get imposed on experience, on the archive,” webster writes, early on in the collection, “comporting its materials to its shape, becoming the less by which not only the events and sequence of the past are determined but also their meaning. you are a student of story: a familiar one is that of uplift through adversity, that those who work and toil do so with the eventuality of ascendancy.”

This reads as a reclamation project, working through the archive, whether newspaper or family story or other records, to discover the possibilities of what otherwise the author can’t access. This is not the archival process of a poet such as Edmonton-based Jordan Abel [see my essay on Abel here], attempting to access the touchstone of an absent father and, thus, a distance from a particular culture and foundation, but one in which webster seeks, quite directly, the touchstone of an ancestor known only through these stories, one that can only be better known, at this point, through this piecemeal process of abstraction, unverifiable stories and unstoried facts. As webster writes:

you cannot bring together the complex material of your grandfather’s life through story, something is always erased from the surface when you attempt to constrict the dimensions of his living with that of a scene or chapter that takes place in the forty-two-inch-by-twenty-five-inch sleeping car and is reproduced on this five-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-quarter page. even the one hundred twenty pages from Reginald’s employment files, which you have purchased photocopies of from the National Archives in Atlanta, are compressed, comport less to a life than to its abbreviation.

As webster works to write a way through the archival facts and family stories into something known, possible and tangible, Without Terminus offers the structure and cadence of a long poem through prose narrative, the strength of such a project compounded through the layerings of narrative structures. Through researching the grand elements of history and archive, webster seeks the intimacy of their grandfather.

your mother tells you a story about retirement, your grandfather’s twenty-five years of service as a pullman porter. every time you say the title you feel the word pull stretching itself out in your mouth, a pulllllllllman porter. she told you of the constraints of his labor, its years, and how they pulled from him, pulled years from him, how he would retire without pension and then would die with no triumphant ballad, your mother is the inaugural archive, your point of origin for what you come to know about your grandfather, archive here being a slippery word, one that could indicate a physical geography where the collected materials of history have been stored or something more ephemeral, a body of knowledge, the archive of material experience, both are full of elisions and gaps, you step into them.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Daniel Moysaenko

Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in Chicago Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The Poetry Review. He practices law and lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I felt like I could breathe. It made me feel less delusional about my long commitment to and sacrifices for poetry. This more recent work is, for the first time, project-bound: being about the war in Ukraine. So it is more thematically cohesive as well as more direct and contextualized than my previous work, which not only arose from questions and silences but continued to dwell there, rather than moving onto higher ground.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I recited poems every week in Ukrainian school, which I attended from kindergarten through junior year of high school. And I read more poetry than anything else as a child. My brain more naturally gravitates toward the poetic line and its practice of attention, as opposed to plot or character development. The music, I think, first drew me into the poem, deeper and deeper until I found myself in a tunnel unlike the world created by fiction or non-fiction. Though I still read plenty of it, fiction was less of an interest—as a writer of things—compared to poetry when young, and that mostly stuck.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

My work often originates as a collection of flotsam and jetsam, but goes through multiple forms, requiring months of accumulation, erasure, revision, and editing. I write discrete lines, or full stanzas with no anchor. Then I mull it all over, add to the existing lines or combine them. Or I write a long, sloppy ramble, which does not work at all, and I later slice it up. Occasionally, if lucky, a poem comes out whole without much effort and without needing much revision at all. Funnily, those turn out to be my favorites (though not always others’ favorites). So my writing is both quick and slow. Writing projects are going on at all times, at various stages of development, in the same way I have multiple books open for reading at once.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem usually begins with an image for me. I tend to write short pieces that either stand alone or sidle up against other short pieces to become stanzas or sections of a serial poem. Over the years, I have noticed that having the concept of a “book” helps direct me, so that I am not casting around aimlessly for months or even years producing poems whose only relationship is that my ever-mutable mind wrote them.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Orality is extremely important to the process. The poems’ sound is largely—twinned with image—my entry. If it doesn’t sound right, it’s gone. Public readings are a community-sustaining way of showing this to others. Though they take a lot out of me, I do enjoy giving readings, enacting the work and guiding readers’ through the way I hear the book.

6 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think it would be prudent if the role of the writer in the U.S. were cultural bellwether, counsel, attaché.

7 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I do not find working with an editor to be difficult, having spent more than a decade being workshopped and taking advice from editors. I really value them. Outside suggestions or queries are useful as quick correctives for a problem I had missed, or as opportunities to rethink a decision and either reapproach that crux or reaffirm my underlying reasoning. All of that, I think, strengthens the work.

8 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It has been a natural state for me to move among poetry, translation, critical work, and fiction. I may spend months or years focused on one or two, toggling between them, and then find myself drained. Other genres rush in to fill the space left and reinvigorate me. Translation, especially, recharges the mind for my own poems. There, you are both creating and kneeling at the mercy of existing language, balancing between fidelity and estrangement, mimicry and imagination, domestication and foreignization, to mold a poem in English that does to an English speaker what the original did to readers of that language. Switching modes feels like stepping out of an airport in the tropics and taking off your parka. So I never have writers’ block per se. There’s always some other kind of writing I could be doing if one type is coming up dry. And the genres necessarily challenge one another. Is this really a narrative poem or a story that hasn’t been completed? What form best serves this idea? What can this form do that the others cannot?

9 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

With a “9-5” job, I write when I can: a snippet in the early morning, something after dinner, a few hours on the weekend. The trick for me has been to keep the mind engaged with the literary, with the way a poet attends to the world, at least for a few dedicated moments every day; that may not be actual writing, but it keeps the writer in my mind alive.

10 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to international writers to pull me out of the milieu and habits of U.S. literature.

11 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Geranium, river clay, lilac, pipe tobacco.

12 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Many forms influence my poems: nature’s patterns and morality, visual art’s clarity and invention, architecture’s stories, the way music moves structurally and emotionally.

13 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Here is an incomplete list of poets: George Oppen, Etel Adnan, Paul Celan, Tomas Tranströmer, W.S. Merwin, Alejandra Pizarnik, Amelia Rosselli, Wallace Stevens, Serhiy Zhadan, Wisława Szymborska, Franz Wright, Jack Gilbert, Jean Valentine, Mark Strand, Yannis Ritsos, Rosmarie Waldrop, Chika Sagawa, Anne Carson, Nathaniel Mackey, John Ashbery, James Tate, Louise Glück, Cole Swensen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Susan Howe.

14 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to learn how to grow grapes and make wine. I’d like to learn a few more languages. I’d like to build a cabin. I’d like to write a book that requires me to change my life in some manner in order to write it.

15 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I might have stuck with music and pushed past the, at times, frustrating drudgery of going over a bar again and again. Or I may have more seriously pursued astrophysics or psychology, when professors in college offered opportunities to work in their labs and I chose poetry instead—which seemed to encompass every discipline plus the intangible.

16 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I just found myself writing (as transcription, transfiguration, exorcism, reclamation). It was the one thing I compulsively did that would make an entire day go by, quickly, with joy, absorbed in the practice.

17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I am late to these, but nevertheless: Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald; Casting Deep Shade, C.D. Wright. 

18 - What are you currently working on?

I am revising a novel I began in late 2014, set in New England, which I workshopped with Noy Holland. And I am developing a second novel that charts a Ukrainian family’s journey from World War I through the Cold War. Also, I am polishing a third poetry collection largely written during the pandemic about what it means to tend, to take care of the earth, loved ones, yourself, and those who do not want the help you are able to give.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;