Serena Chopra, Patrycja Humienik, Nicholas Gulig

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Serena Chopra for a poetry reading for her new collection, A Catalog of Future Mercies. She will be joined with readings from Patrycja Humienik and Nicholas Gulig. 

This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own Bookstore in Madison, WI.

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 has 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, Ic, and A Catalog of Future Mercies.