First published in 1984, Book of Mercy is Leonard Cohen's collection of contemporary psalms—short prose-poems written in the tradition of devotional literature yet unmistakably modern in voice and preoccupation. Cohen, celebrated as a songwriter and poet and one of the most consistently daring artists of his era, composed these fifty short pieces at a difficult period in his life, drawing on his Jewish heritage and the language of the Hebrew psalms while remaining thoroughly a creature of the contemporary world. The result is a book of prayer for readers who may not pray in any conventional sense: the pieces move between praise and despair, doubt and trust, anger and surrender, addressing a God who is by turns present, absent, and elusive. Cohen writes from the heart of ordinary modern experience—its distractions, failures, and longings—yet reaches for the older cadences of supplication and thanksgiving, so that the collection feels at once ancient and immediate. Brief and distilled, each psalm gives voice to intuitions that resist plainer statement: the wish to be forgiven, the struggle to quiet the self, the search for grace amid confusion. The book has remained in print and beloved for decades, valued both as a key to the spiritual undercurrents in Cohen's songs and as a standalone work of literary devotion. Readers who know Cohen chiefly through his music will recognize the same gravity, wit, and yearning here, concentrated into a form that sits somewhere between poetry and prayer. Book of Mercy endures as one of his most personal and quietly powerful works.