Böcker av Jesse Lee Kercheval

Poems That Urgently Remind Us Love Keeps Us Alive

America that island off the coast of France speaks to the impossibility of emigration, of ever being the citizen of only one country. Born in France, raised in Florida, Kercheval now divides her time between the U.S. and Uruguay. The poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience to create a new form of elegiac memoir. Against the backdrops of Paris, Montevideo, and Florida, the poems explore citizenship and homelessness, motherhood and self, family and freedom, turning over and over again the very meaning of the word home, as the poems, like the poet, make the fraught journey back and forth between America and France. As Kercheval wonders in her poem "The Red Balloon," "is leaving / ever painless? Is returning?"

A newlywed gazes upon the wreckage of the Titanic. A young woman becomes the protege of a Parisian hotelier. An old woman meets an angel in a ghost town. Underground Women is a compilation of short stories by multitalented writer Jesse Lee Kercheval.

Wisconsin is not where Alice, a girl raised in Florida, meant to end up. But when she falls in love with Anders Dahl, the son of Norwegian farmers born for generations in the same stone farmhouse, she realizes that to love Anders is to settle into a life in Wisconsin in the small house they buy before their daughter, Maude, is born.

Jesse Lee Kercheval opens her story in Cocoa, Florida, in 1966 as a precocious ten-year-old whose family-father, mother, two little girls-is trying to ride the Space Race's tide of optimism. But even as the rockets keep going up, the Kercheval family slowly spirals down.

After her husband's death, Ginny Gillespie travels with his ashes to Paris, where she meets and falls in love with Roland Keppi, a strange, visionary man without a country. But when Roland is deported to a German camp for people without identity papers, their dreamlike affair is disrupted.

Even with the most dynamic language, images and characters, no piece of fiction will work without a strong infrastructure. Kercheval shows how to build that structure using such tools as point of view, characterization, pacing and flashbacks.