Keynote
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Victoria Chang
Book Title
Little Mercy
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “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
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.
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.
List Price
$17.00
Purchase at
Purchase at:
About the Author
Credit: Susan Shapard Biggs
Praise
- “These poems are persuasive testimony to the ‘practicing [of] love, then grief’ that our lives mostly amount to. If each day that we’re still alive on earth is a little mercy, so too is this tender, exciting spell of a debut.”—Carl Phillips
