Little Mercy
Poems
by Robin Walter
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Pub Date Apr 01 2025 | Archive Date Mar 31 2025
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Description
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.
Advance Praise
“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
“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
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Bookseller outreach campaign
Social media promotion
Targeted digital advertising
Select author events
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781644453308 |
| PRICE | $17.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 96 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Kasey L, Reviewer
I loved these nature poems. I felt instantly transported to outside, watching the wind on leaves and the birds in the trees. These poems were easy to read and I think would be easy for any reader, especially ones who don’t normally read poetry.
Thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for a copy of this ARC!
Keely C, Reviewer
The keenly observed poems in Little Mercy are meditations on the magic of paying attention, of immersing oneself in the rhythms of a wren visiting her nestlings, of noticing the morning sun seeming to revolve around a daisy, or delighting in the the finer points of the letter "j." There's a self-consciousness to the poems. In multiple places, the speaker mentions considering some writing choice--say, how to describe the color of a worm--then goes on to make the choice. It's an expressed uncertainty that's vulnerable and appealing, and yet adds to the sense of inner turmoil roiling just beneath the surface of all the vivid nature imagery. In this collection, the solace that nature has to offer filters through grief and pain on its way to the page--and it becomes richer and more textured in the process.
Little Mercy is a joy to read. The poems are accessible, and there are flashes of memorable poetic language throughout. Because of some funky formatting in my digital review copy, it was hard to tell where one poem ended and the next one began, but that ended up working just fine for me. You really can read and enjoy the collection as one extended book-length poem.
My thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for providing me with a copy of Little Mercy in exchange for my review.
