2.25.2026

MERCY, by Rachel Custer (Monday Editions, 2026)

Feb 25, 2026

**Cover art: Sue Rose,** **The Bookmobile,** **2026, acrylic on wood, 8 x 8 inches**

It’s publication day for Mercy, Rachel Custer’s third poetry collection, just released in a limited edition signed and numbered by the author. The cover illustration, by the incomparable Sue Rose, is a treasure in itself.

Preorders were brisk, but you can still pick up a copy here ($22; price includes shipping within the continental US). In the Monday Editions publishing model, authors receive 100 percent of proceeds from book sales, and so your purchase of Mercy provides direct financial and moral support to a poet with a uniquely brilliant voice.

Order MERCY here.

Waning Gibbous IV, executive editor at Monday Editions, has more to say about this collection, which invites readers into the world of Ruth and Naomi and the Little Free Library they’ve built for the benefit (and often to the consternation) of their neighbors in tiny Mercy, Indiana. Here’s a peek inside.

**Rachel Custer, “Deanna Reads** **The Velveteen Rabbit,” in** **Mercy** **(Monday Editions, 2026), p. 5**

Rachel Custer had me weeping with her introduction to Mercy, and I kept weeping as I read the poems. Only rarely has a book caused me so much grief and joy at the same time. Custer writes of books that “get in your blood” and “alter you.” I can say that her poems have altered me. I was also a poor kid who depended on the bookmobile. The bookmobile was the most dependable thing in my life. I believe the same was true for Custer.
— Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian (National Book Award, 2007), War Dances (PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 2010), and ten collections of poetry

Like all books of excellence, Mercy flings open a world that edifies and challenges and changes its readers. In these linked poems, two women live together in mythical Mercy, Indiana, a tiny “finger wag of a town.” We come to know Mercy’s residents—factory workers, clergymen, farmers, and a host of others battered by poverty, addiction, and despair—through the books they borrow from the two women’s Little Free Library. This is a beautiful book, musical and full of surprising turns of phrase that will “stick inside you like a hook,” proving that “what makes a story true is how it’s told.”
— Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain and What Small Sound

Every book from Monday Editions includes grateful acknowledgment of the press’s supporters.1 The list that started out as the Copyright Club, short enough to appear on a book’s copyright page, has grown long enough to need a page of its own.

How do you join the Colophon Club? In the time‑honored American tradition, you buy your way in. Take out an annual subscription, or maintain a monthly one, to Diary Poems or Monday Editions. Buy me a coffee (or two, or three). Or buy one of my books in its limited edition. (In the Monday Editions publishing model, my own books, in their limited edition, are the only ones from which I personally receive revenue, though paying subscribers to either Diary Poems or Monday Editions get my books as a premium.) Every cent from subscriptions and purchases supports the press in its mission of radically author‑centered publishing.