MERCY

Expanding breathlessly in the magnitude of loss, 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 work of mourning and moving forward.

AWARDS
2020

Finalist, High Plains Book Awards — Poetry

ADVANCE PRAISE

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

PRAISE

Camia’s clear and concise lines echo the unsayable and the difficult in trails that simulate the staccato beating of the heart.
– Patria Rivera, the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Camia takes the overly complicated anguish of loss and distills it down to the most raw and vulnerable details.
– Charity Dewing, Senior Editor for Special Sections, Billings Gazette

Whether or not you have a personal grief to draw from (as most readers do), this collection will make you feel.
– Juliette Sebock, Marias at Sampaguitas

The poems in Mercy are sparse, like the barest exhale… When there is standard form in this breathy collection, it is couplets, or couplets interspersed with a single line, as if to say: us two, us two; just me. In their shape and pacing, these poems are the fleeting hope that winds itself through grief and the loneliness of the grieving.
– Sherre Vernon, Mom Egg Review

[Camia’s] pain translates in these poems as does her slowly coming to terms with her loss. There’s no disconnect in regards to what any readers need to understand about this collection. It’s meant to be personal, emotional and possibly uncomfortable to read. And while the grief is individual, as is any type grief, each poem reminds the reader that healing isn’t linear. It’s a process.
– Vanessa Maki, Marias at Sampaguitas

So many moments of magic, so many bursts of light.
– Joe Cummings, CBC Radio Broadcaster and Poet, Threats and Gossip

PURCHASE
Turnstone Press