“Our tongues tie trying / to articulate the knot,” writes Serena Chopra in her simultaneously tender and exacting new collection A Catalog of Future Mercies. When she writes, later, “I pry this intimacy with my teeth,” I believe her.
Throughout, Chopra provides us with snippets with patient circuity—of family stories, myths, rituals—to illustrate the means by which she more deeply understands herself. Overall, reading A Catalog of Future Mercies has the effect of watching an embroidery stitch, at times loose and confusing as the needle punches through fabric—until an expert finger pulls the thread taught.
After several graceful, meditative pages, we piece together the circumstances, which start almost a century ago, with Chopra’s paternal grandparents. Her grandfather was mentally ill, an alcoholic; her grandmother attempted suicide multiple times in a nearby river. As a child, Chopra’s father often had to coax his mother away from the waterway. One night, he locks himself in a room to hide from his father during a manic rage. Chopra’s grandfather throws gasoline and burns the door. The boy escapes out a window and over the garden wall.
“How did we get here?” is a question that hounds those in moments of extremis. The terrible pains of Chopra’s father and grandparents extend into the next generation—hurled epithets, bruised eyes, family secrets. Chopra explains how her father gave her little information, “sparing me the complex uneasiness.” A few reticent decades are enough to render life-defining hurts to mere fuzzy suspicion for those who come after.
