MERCY, poetry by Megan Leonard

Publication Date: December 15, 2026

Paperback, 106 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-66-6

 When the narrator in this ghost story accidentally discovers a family secret, she goes back in time to haunt her grandfather, forcing him to reckon with the ramifications of his choices. Threaded into this generational haunting is the real-life story of Mercy Disbrow, who was accused and found guilty of witchcraft in 1692, and who is the many-greats grandmother to the narrator and her family. As the effects of family secrets and generational trauma unspool, spells, incantations, and magic float to the surface: the tools and meditations for getting the ghosts of previous generations out of the present.

Praise for Megan Leonard & Mercy

Mercy’s multifaceted ghost stories speak in the vernacular of witchcraft—scales, bones, frogs abound—but are, at their core, complex explorations of the truly occult, containing vast troves of information that has been lost, obscured, or suppressed: a childhood marked by unexpressed anger; a grandfather’s secret family; the author’s many-greats grandmother, Mercy Disbrow, accused of witchcraft, whose court records include “pages and / pages of what men thought of her” but not a word of Mercy’s own. Megan Leonard takes on the tender responsibility of telling a fuller and more imaginative story than the silences of the archive ever could, speaking for Mercy when her own voice was quite literally not taken into account. Much as a surprise glimpse of a snake’s movement draws attention to secret space inside a stone wall, Leonard’s skillful, deeply-felt poems emerge to illuminate the omissions in the record.

—Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, author of Girl in a Bear Suit

In her new poetry collection, Mercy, Megan Leonard knits together the story of her ancestor, a condemned witch in 1692 New England, with the stories of women across generations in her family. She asks, “How many generations / will it take / for the devil’s voice / to shake out / of my dna / my blood, pumping / beating pulsing / in my deafened, my secret-keeping / ear?” Leonard wields the poet’s tools masterfully in the telling, weaving these poems into spells of rage and sorrow, of “leafmuck” and lichen, of tenderness and clarity. Mercy is a gorgeous, haunting, page-turner of a book that will make you reexamine your own family stories in their uncanny, transformative light.

—Emily Mohn-Slate, author of The Falls

From the first lines of this book—“wild the eye, wild the shine / – let the fisher kits come / into the chicken yard”—I was ensorcelled. Mercy is a spellbook, a page-turner, a ghost story by way of genealogy. It is also a reckoning. In these haunting, tender poems, Leonard interrogates the past’s secrets and the present’s demands, and asks what we owe to those whose histories we hold.

—Catherine Pierce, author of Dear Beast

About the Author

Megan Leonard (she/they) is the author of four collections of poetry, including Mercy and Larkspur Queen, both from Broadstone Books. Meg is the founder of The Writing Mentors, which assists writers in deepening their writing practice at any stage in their creative process. You can find updates about Meg’s work at meganleonardpoetry.com.