Serena Chopra presents A Catalog of Future Mercies with Sarah Ghazal Ali

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.

Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. She is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and an alumna RedLine Resident Artist. Chopra is an associate professor of creative writing at Seattle University.

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of (Alice James Books, 2024), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, California Book Award, and Julie Suk Award, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.

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