Search results for ""Author Jesse Lee Kercheval""

After losing her husband and daughter in an auto accident, 42-year-old Emma flies to Paris, discovers she has a twin brother whose existence she had not known about, and learns that her birth parents weren't the Americans who raised her, but a White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist. A story about identity and the shaping function of art, My Life as a Silent Movie presents a vividly rendered world and poses provocative questions on the relationship of art to life.

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In Jesse Lee Kercheval’s sixth collection, I Want to Tell You, her searching, incantatory poems speak directly and forcefully to the reader in a voice that is by turns angry, elegiac, wry, or witty but always sharply alive. Crossing through the bewildering territory of grief, Kercheval argues with god and the universe about the deaths of people she loves. She also writes movingly about the complications of family life and love, the messy puzzle of life itself.

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Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño’s poetry. Her poems draw on motherhood, the loses in the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s and, most of all, the natural world. She is a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own.

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Floating between memoir and philosophical inquiry, Mariella Nigro’s Memory Rewritten explores the ongoing impact of a childhood trauma and the power of poetry to come to terms with loss, even finding beauty in it. "Sister souls of mine, never look back!" admonished Uruguayan modernist poet Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) in an elegy that reminds us of the fate of the biblical Lot’s wife as well as the ill-fated Orpheus. But sometimes, looking back is necessary – particularly when it is a sister who has been lost. Uruguayan poet Mariella Nigro’s Memory Rewritten is a meditation on the insufficiency of language to provide a container for human emotion and memory– and yet the reality that it is the only means we have. "I’m writing an elegy / and so I’m arranging a dark bouquet of useless words /with their eloquence of broken petals / and burning in the rhetoric of embroidered leaves / the poem grows in black water / of the fragile overflowing vase," Nigro states. The ghost of a beloved sister dead in childhood haunts these poems, as does the need for repetition, the compulsion to return to the sites of loss and pain. However, rather than merely repeating memories, Nigro elegantly transforms them, salvaging beauty from the wreckage: “In a box I locked like Eleusian mysteries the poems we’d shared the previous year under the January moon, along with the colored ribbons and glass beads that we’d fought over, now mine alone.” In a poetics reminiscent of Helene Cixous’s ecriture feminine, Nigro transforms the visceral, bodily experiences of loss and brings the reader along with her on a journey where grief does not proceed in any orderly stages, where pain and healing coexist within the mess of language, and out of them emerges a poem.

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