Books by Jesse Lee Kercheval

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?"

After a tragic loss, an American woman investigates her birth family in Paris: ';The novel's twists and turns are wonderfully unexpected' (Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers). In her early forties, Emma has recently lost her husband and daughter to a tragic auto accident. When her elderly aunt visits her Indiana home to provide comfort, and instead blurts out the news that Emma was adopted, a new kind of shock sets in. Soon, a still-mourning Emma finds herself flying to Paris, where she will discover the twin brother whose existence she never knew about, and the identity of her birth parentsa White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist. A story about identity and the relationship between art and life, My Life as a Silent Movie is ';a beautiful, evocative novel [that] melds the magic of old movies with the redemptive power of family' (Jonis Agee,author of The Bones of Paradise). ';In this sharply drawn chronicle of grief, a woman reassembles her identity through her father's art and her brother's tenuous offer of a new life... Kercheval delves deeply into the rawest of emotions and the most wrenching of choices, richly detailing each twist and turn with grace.' Kirkus Reviews

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.

Full of wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty, these poems trace the timelines of Kercheval's life forward and backward, offering a moving examination of the connections that bind us together into families and communities.