Dog Angel

Juxtaposing American pop culture and European tradition, [Kercheval] takes readers to the Zippo Museum and the Prado, to a college town where 'everyday we slouched / toward this Bethlehem of lunch counters.' Kercheval's imagination torques language; she elegizes human innocence ('golden in a marzipan of calm') and critiques the experiences of adult child, artist, parent.

The wise and often uncomfortable descent from the notion of God as the ultimate answer to life, to Kercheval's view that God . . . truly lives in the quixotic vagaries of life. . . What is outstanding about this work is Kercheval's assured voice, and so whatever she imagines or knows about God, we want to believe without question. . . . Kercheval is the real thing.

Death, beauty, fragility, humor, loss, freedom are all fair and fertile game, and within this extremely cohesive collection of poems, Kercheval convinces us that the bile-inducing darkness of being human can and does exist in full view of the wonder of understanding. It is through her deft, contained and often witty touch with language that Kercheval is able to seduce us with the everyday world, and then surprise us as to what riches (and darkness) lie both below and above the status quo.

Kercheval renders those moments where life, philosophy, history, and culture collide to yield wisdom or the questions that might lead us to wisdom. 'Dog Angel' gives us poems that reach towards God.