JKS Chair Valerie Hsiung & Serena Chopra in Conversation About Their New Books
Serena Chopra and Valerie Hsiung will speak about and sign their new books, A Catalog of Future Mercies and The Pedestrian on Wednesday, August 19 at 6:30pm, at Boulder Bookstore.
About A Catalog of Future Mercies:
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.
About The Pedestrian:
Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The Pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo–courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The Pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold–it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself.
