A Catalog of Future Mercies

“Tender and exacting.”–Diana Arterian, Literary Hub

“These poems rock across the page with a rhythm so sharp I heard drums reading them. The way she uses space on the page, and her timing and language, will break you open, make you tender in ways only a queer poet can.”–Katie Lee Ellison, The Stranger

“The feminine in Chopra’s work is robust and tenacious; it is within this strength that mercy roots and, later in the collection, rises… . An arresting account.”–Karen Sherk Chio, West Trade Review

“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. As perhaps only a dancer can, Chopra takes the muscle of music to memories that most minds refuse outright, and has excavated the most tender song from the shatter and thunder of violence. Chopra has urged the hardest questions about domestic violence in immigrant communities out from hiding, and her poems guide us, with vigilant tenderness, out of hardened habits of witness and into fuller, more daring compassion. A Catalog of Future Mercies emerges into our world at a time of recoil and horror to change how we address our untended capacity for forgiveness. It invites us to contemplate that urgent, grand human feeling: mercy. And it has been made with transformative, and transforming, courage.”–Divya Victor, author of CURB

“Serena Chopra’s astonishing third collection choreographs memory, oral transcription, archival photography, and lyric to lay bare the legacy of domestic violence traced along a patrilineal line. Here, the ‘poem is a stage on which the wound swerves, ’ the poem is an afterimage, and the facts of ancestral (mis)deeds, sufferings, and ailments linger like ghosts in the dark halls of one’s mind. A Catalog of Future Mercies reads like memoir in verse; it conjures Don Mee Choi, Brandon Som, and Divya Victor. Chopra’s cataloguing is auto-ethnographic: she’s 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, an ‘uneasy poetry of building home.’ It is heartbreaking to witness and in doing so, I found that I, too, learned to braid hope alongside the speaker. To be born is to survive, to love despite, to dance.”–Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost of

Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. She holds 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.

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