Penance: Mercy For the Living Hardcover – January 15, 2026

Penance: Mercy for the Living is written from the aftermath—after love fractures, after belief is tested to its breaking point, after what once sustained no longer holds.These poems move through grief that does not resolve cleanly, love that sanctifies and wounds in equal measure, and faith that survives not through certainty, but through endurance. Here, prayer is not polite. Mercy is not gentle. God is encountered not in comfort, but in reckoning.Drawing from longing, spiritual hunger, inherited grief, survival, and embodiment, Penance speaks to those who have loved deeply, waited faithfully, and found themselves changed by what did not save them.Following For the Love of Limerence, this work continues an exploration of devotion, rupture, and what it means to remain—after the loss, after the silence, after the altar has gone quiet.There are no easy answers here. Only the cost of staying. Only what endures. Read more