Mercy Said, Justice Gone: A Parable in Five Acts

This book will break your heart and mend it back together again, all in one fell swoop. -Andrea Rexilius, Director of the Creative Writing programme at Regis University in Denver

We enter David Shannon's Mercy Said as witnesses warned that justice is gone, and through a beauty and play with language and form, his poetry becomes the catastrophic injuries that tear us apart: addiction, disability, poverty, homelessness, and the doctors who slate us to die because it's easier than fixing us. This collection also becomes the stitches that sew us back together, the nourishment that feeds us, the blanket that wraps us up for the night. Through his writing, Shannon is an advocate for the sick, the discarded, the forgotten, the euthanized. His poetry will wound, destroy, resurrect... keep us 'less than well and more than ill, ' and our 'minds above the curtains and grounded by the balls' in complete mental disorder. This collection is 'paper on our jugular, ' an unapologetic pressure sore you'll want to pick at until it looks nothing like the reality exposed here. -Shannon Malloy, Poet

The five-act parable Mercy Said, is both a critique and contemplation of what happens when justice and mercy are declared in order to negate compassion. In poetic form, David Shannon explores the paradoxes of the violent use of so-called justice and mercy in current political discourses and amidst social fissures of disability. In the parables and poems of Mercy Said, we see the profound intersections of disability with poverty, vulnerability, and addiction.

David Shannon, CM, OOnt (b. 1963) is a Canadian disability and human rights activist, lawyer, university lecturer, author, and adventurer. He is most recently co-editor (with Dr. Jaro Kotalik) of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada: Key Interdisciplinary Perspectives [Vol. 1] (Springer, 2023) and Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada: Trends and Consequences [Vol. 2] (Springer, 2025).