Keynote
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Victoria Chang
Book Title
Little Mercy
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “The poems are lyrical and stunning in their imagery and tone. . . . It’s hard to suggest what different readers might find most powerful or true about this collection, but it will serve many, as wise books often do, as a guide they weren’t aware they needed.”—Sara Verstynen, Booklist
Poem Excerpt
Sometimes,
I cannot 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.
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Susan Shapard Biggs
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
