Chaucer’s Books hosts writer, dancer, performance artist and filmmaker Serena Chopra for a discussion of her poetry book A Catalog of Future Mercies.  Joining the poet is writer Monica Mody.

In her luminous memoir-in-poems, A Catalog of Future Mercies, 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.

“Serena Chopra is 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. . . . It is heartbreaking to witness and in doing so, I found that I, too, learned to braid hope alongside the speaker.”—Diana Khoi Nguyen

Discussant Dr. Monica Mody, assistant professor at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, is a public scholar and practitioner of earth-sourced decolonial and border knowledges. She is a transdisciplinary bricoleuse and perspective-liberator with multi-year experience activating groups and individuals through talks, keynotes, workshops, and classes. Her work focuses on reimagining ways of being and relating in the world, dynamic self-transformation, and collective wisdom futures.

Sunday, August 30, 4 pm

Chaucer’s Books, 3321 State Street, Santa Barbara