Skip to main navigation Skip to main content

Fraud Alert!! Please be wary of any freelance or other job offers from entities claiming to be Graywolf Press, especially through UpWork and similar job search platforms. Graywolf currently has no open positions, we are NOT currently looking for freelancers, and we will only engage in hiring using emails from the graywolfpress.org domain. 

Book Title

Little Mercy

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Robin Walter
Poem Excerpt

Sometimes,

I can’t recall

my own name—

 

I mean, sometimes

can’t sleep, can’t

speak,

 

forget

all about

wrens—

 

Still, the day opens. Call me

meadow. Call me horse.

River, call me—

 

—from “Robin has always been my name”

Body
In award-winning poet Robin Walter’s debut collection, Little Mercy, writing and looking—seeing feelingly—become a practice in radical care. These poems pursue moments of shared recognition, when looking up to see a deer across a stream, or when sunlight passes through wingtip onto palm, the self found in other, the river in vein of wrist.

Attuned to the transparent beauty in the natural world, Walter’s poems are often glancing observations unspooling down the page, their delicacies belying their powers of profound knowing. The formal logic of this work is the intricate architecture of a nest. Each line becomes a blade of grass, each dash a little twig, each parenthesis a small feather—all woven together deliberately, seemingly fragile but held fast with surprising strength. In their lyric variations, repetitions, and fragments, employed toward a deep attention to wren, river, and reflection, the human almost falls away entirely, a steady and steadying state of being that is unconscious, expansive.

Written out of a broken landscape in a broken time, Little Mercy is a book of gratitude, one that draws our inner selves to the present and living world, to the ways we can break and mend.

Share Title

List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-330-8
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
96
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Victoria Chang

About the Author

Robin  Walter
Credit: Susan Shapard Biggs
Robin Walter is a poet, book artist, and printmaker. Her writing has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
More by author

Upcoming Events

Robin Walter reading and in conversation with Oluwaseun Olayiwola for LITTLE MERCY at Books Are Magic

Date:
Location:
Books Are Magic (Montague Street) in Brooklyn, NYview map

Robin Walter reading and in conversation with Ramona Ausubel for LITTLE MERCY at Boulder Book Store

Date:
Location:
Boulder Book Store in Boulder, COview map
This event is ticketed. Purchase tickets and learn more here.

Robin Walter reading and in conversation with Madi Manson about LITTLE MERCY at the Loud Flower Art Company.

Date:
Location:
Loud Flower Art Co in view map

Robin Walter reading and in conversation with Rebecca Spiegel for LITTLE MERCY at Tattered Cover Bookstore

Date:
Location:
Tattered Cover Book Store - Colfax Avenue in Denver, COview map

Jim Moore (ENTER) and Robin Walter (LITTLE MERCY) reading and in conversation at Magers & Quinn

Date:
Location:
Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis, MNview map
Free and open to the public. Registration required. Copies of Enter and Little Mercy will be available for purchase from Magers & Quinn.

Praise

  • “The scenery of Colorado comes alive on the page: chickadees sing, honeybees flit, lilies blossom. Walter’s delicate poems hold the reader close and extol the beauty of the natural world.”—Skylar Miklus, Electric Literature
  • Little Mercy is an unflustered, exquisite debut that declares in one of its many strong, sure lines that seem truest in their calm unfolding: ‘Still, the day opens.’ The whole book is a series of constant, further, and deeper openings, twigs under stillness and rivers under skin.”Poetry Northwest
  • “It's that noticing that characterizes Little Mercy, which isn't so much a collection in the traditional sense as it’s almost a book-length poem itself. Yes, pieces are divided into individual fun-size smackerels of language, and each has its own title — but the book is meant to be taken as a whole, much like studio albums from the 1970s, these opuses of cohesive small parts making a larger whole. The structure of the whole is pliant, even loose, but it returns to certain touchstones over and over to suggest a hollow-boned but effective structure. Palms, wrens, nests, hands, cradle, wings. Almost like a sestina.”—Teague Bohlen, Westword
  • “When the reader encounters these poems on the page, time unfolds (and refolds, enfolds, foals, and foils) in their arrangements, and when the reader recites these poems, one can feel space bending and waning, waging their own little mercies aloud. Such music. Robin Walter sings.”—Kazim Ali
Back to Table of Contents