“Our tongues are trying to tie a knot,” writes Serena Chopra in her simultaneously tender and precise new collection. a list of future mercies. When she writes, later, “I see this intimacy through my teeth,” I believe her.
Throughout, Chopra provides us with snippets of family stories, myths, patient circuits of ritual – the means by which she understands herself more deeply. Overall, read a list of future mercies It has the effect of watching an embroidery stitch, sometimes loose and confusing as the needle pierces through the fabric – until an expert finger pulls the thread taught.
After several beautiful, reflective pages, we connect the circumstances, which began with Chopra’s grandparents nearly a century ago. Her grandfather was mentally ill, an alcoholic; Her grandmother attempted suicide several times in a nearby river. As a child, Chopra’s father often had to take her mother away from the waterways. One night, he locks himself in a room to hide from his father during a manic rage. Chopra’s grandfather threw gasoline and burnt the door. The boy runs out of the window and over the garden wall.
“How did we get here?” This is a question that haunts those in moments of extremity. The terrible traumas of Chopra’s father and grandparents are extended to the next generation – the hurled epithets, the bruised eyes, the family secrets. Chopra describes how her father gave her very little information, “saving me from complex anxiety.” A few reticences are enough to turn a life-defining pain into mere vague doubt for those who come decades later.
Through interviews and premonitions, Chopra pieces together this fragmented knowledge largely through interviews with her father, who shares much that he had previously kept hidden. As he gets closer to the unspeakable facts (his mother’s suicide attempt, the devastating attack by his mother-in-law that drove him to this point, his father’s erratic behavior), his sentences become distorted. Chopra bears witness to these histories with compassion. As Divya Victor writes in praise of the book, “a list of future mercies “Times of repentance and fear in our world transform how we address our untapped capacity for forgiveness.”
Below are Chopra’s comments on her to-read pile, along with some fun details about her nightstand and its trinkets.
The two corner cabinets make up my nightstands. They are live edge wood – made by a former student of mine who is an excellent carpenter. Shelf host: A coaster for my cup of water, a candle for romance, two stacks of books, three notebooks with a pen in a pen loop, a yellow jade pixyu charm from poet Sueyun Juliet Lee, an amber pendant from my grandmother, a peace lily, three bamboos, jade from the PNW coast and a tiger’s eye, a love letter pressed from a flower, a beloved photo in a blue frame, and often a starry eye in the morning Cat.
*
Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (Ed. Kristen Miller)
I had a garden party. We were sitting by the fire, and a friend asked me who my favorite poet was. I couldn’t answer that question but said that one of my favorite poems was Dickinson’s “The Brain-Is Wider Than the Sky” and I suddenly found myself getting emotional lecturing to students about poetry. My friends listened generously as I discussed that poem and the posthumous editorial controversy over Dickinson’s poetry. At some point, I mentioned that all three of my Dickinson collections were being destroyed. A few months later, my friends gifted me this collection Edited by Kristen Miller, which offers an insightful method of encountering Dickinson’s work through her arrangement of Dickinson’s own poems in a series of hand-stitched facsimiles created between 1858-1865. Miller’s scholarship effortlessly balances razor-sharp research with a try-mint presentation of Dickinson’s approach to her work.
In addition to fascicles, Miller includes poems on unbound sheets and loose poems sent in correspondence and/or written by others. This comprehensive collection is nonetheless accessible and clearly organized, allowing one to feel Dickinson’s attention to and awareness of her own poems and their resonance – in this book, I do not simply read the poems, but experience a kinship with the poet’s constellation mind, drawing me to reflect with the arrangement the poignant, electric empathy that exists for a poet between my own impulses and her poems. I return to this book several nights a week, constantly curious to examine how a poet’s work plays out like an extended conversation, a dynamic durational activity between poet, poem, and poetics (where poetic Not a style, but a way of being and living together). In this collection of Dickinson’s works I look at the poet’s work “in the depths of flux” through Sela Satterstrom’s expression. ideal suggestionWhere contradiction, multiplicity, simultaneity, risk and disorientation are “non-negotiable” imperatives for “participation (reading and writing)” in the flow of existence.
Susan Bryant, defacing the monument
I am reading this book for the second time because it is a revolution. defacing the monument presents an essential contemporary poetics—one I believe we cannot move away from; That, for me, offers a profound and timely answer to Andrew Joron’s initial question. crying at zero: “What is the use of poetry in times like these?” Partly documentary project, partly an investigation of documentary practice and ethics, Bryant’s book simultaneously critiques documentary poetics while serving as a primer for new approaches to the field. However, Bryant’s book reaches far beyond the realm of documentary poetics – it expresses an urgent, poignant, and essential poetics inspired by compassion, awareness, self-reflection, elaboration, recalibration, and accountability. This book keeps my feet on the ground and connects my heart to the great suffering under late-stage capitalism and fascism. Briante writes, “…my compassion will force me to see, directly or indirectly, how I am implicated in (other’s) suffering.” In such times, poetry must adopt the imperative of awareness. I keep this book with me – it’s like an extended mantra for me – my goal is to incorporate its poems into my creative and critical practices, my pedagogy, and my daily life.
Sappho, If Not, Winter: Sappho’s Fragments (tr. Anne Carson)
A book I once lost, this copy was given to me by my boyfriend, in which he wrote, “This love of the language we share is very precious to me. Enjoy these extraordinary excerpts.” Returned to me, I slept with Sappho once again. These “extraordinary pieces” are portals. I return to them to explore things I can’t consciously figure out. They will not surface, they call me to descend. They are divine technologies that pull me out of stagnant logics, equipping me with vision of the unknown, the lost, the night. I read a piece just before bed, starting again and again (as Stein suggests), falling into Sappho’s portals, sleep-walking – visceral yet latent, getting closer to the instinct of islands amid the sea dropping me into the dream. When I wake up on the edge of the portal, the desire to capture what is still glimpsed when I wake up from the dream is what ignites my “love of language.” Sappho and her pieces make me divine. She draws me to understand that my love of language is a desire to be close to the piece, to see the doors within and to the east before language came (or, after it was gone, lost, to stand on the brief shore of its return). This reminds me of Barbara Guest’s “spatial freedom”, and is also described by Stevens. Idea of Order in Key West: “The Creator’s wrath to order the words of the sea, / The words of fragrant portals, dim-starred, / And of us and our origins, / In ghostly demarcation, loud voices.”
Christopher Marmolejo, The Red Tarot: A Colonist’s Guide to Divine Literacy
This year, I had the immense pleasure of joining the Queer Divine Poetics Roundtable panel at the New Orleans Poetry Festival with Christopher Maramolejo, where I learned about his work and this incredible book. red tarot Offers a deep, perceptive, tender, and revolutionary approach to the Tarot that underpins decolonial liberation through modalities that engage reading with “the whole…socially matrixed body” toward an “artistry of dissent.” Regardless of one’s experience with the Tarot, this book offers deep, embodied wisdom for creative and critical writers, artists, and activists. Marmolejo brilliantly weaves the Tarot into essential conversations with important theorists and writers such as José Munoz, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Paulo Freire, Louis Althusser, Franz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, among many others. In the introduction, Marmolejo writes, “reading red White supremacy is strategic to resist and confuse the determined state identity. Lal Pathak Resist assimilation; They work with dominant cultural modalities and materials and restructure them from within to make themselves independent and self-reliant.” I have incorporated this book slowly, day by day, card by card, and it has been a deep learning. I turn to red tarotTo observe, sharpen, and recalibrate my critical awareness and liberatory practices for reading, writing, and being.
Georges Bataille, Sexuality: Death and sexuality
I am reading this book for a project I am currently researching and writing. I’m particularly interested in Bataille’s conversation about the relationship between violence and sexuality and his bold, complex combination of the motivations underpinning each. This book provides a sharp (but complex) critical tool for thinking about these abstract topics individually and in combination through historical, psychological, embodied, and practical gestures. The book’s thinking runs on an uncomfortable familiarity that requires readers to trust Bataille’s journey along with critical observations and impulses. I think I turned to this book to nurture and complicate the finer aspects of loss/defeat, violence, and queer sexuality that are important to my current project.
