Mercy

Expanding breathlessly in the magnitude of loss, Shirley Camia’s fourth collection, Mercy, confronts despair to emerge anew with a bright offering of elegy. Beginning at her mother’s hospital bed, Camia invites readers to keep vigil while she journeys through seasons of bereavement, from the wake to the graveside, and into a year of processing, searching, and healing. Ethereal and elegant, Camia’s reflections are grounded in grief as they do the aching, earth-shattering work of mourning and moving forward.

AUTHOR

Shirley Camia

Shirley Camia is the author of four collections of poetry. Her 2019 collection, Mercy, was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award and her 2017 Children Shouldn’t Use Knives was shortlisted for a ReLit Award. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New Quarterly and The Ex-Puritan.

Reviews

“What Camia captures so authentically in Mercy is the timelessness of loss. These poems evoke an elegiac mode that is as age-old as grief itself, while also inventing surprising ways to write around the perimeters of what’s absent. It’s a tribute to her mother’s passing that invited me in with directness and generosity. From the remnants and rituals, from these “pieces that summon a whole / (hole),” these poems offer a fragile and continuous “treasure.”–Phoebe Wang, Admission Requirements

“Here is an earth song, a death song, a grief song, sung with such gentleness and clarity that every detail, every remembered joy, every terrible moment of surrender, is lit up, vibrant, luminous: “a suitcase / brimming // with / sunflowers.”–Di Brandt, Glitter & fall