I Want to Tell You - University of Pittsburgh Press

I Want to Tell You

Ecstatic, bounding, electric, I Want to Tell You plumbs the elegy while still sizzling with life—a contradiction made right in Jesse Lee Kercheval’s deft hands. Wading through the pools of grief, Kercheval wrestles with God to find meaning in the wake of loss, but not without her characteristic wit, wisdom, and candor. In the tradition of our earliest poets, carving their poems into the clay with a reed, Kercheval’s work declares, ‘My name is Jesse. I write this to remember.’

Jacques J. Rancourt, author of Broken Spectre

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.

SAY THE WORD, BLISS

when the gaudy sun routs
the curtains

& velvet
is
drawn back from window after window
to let the morning in

& night has yet to be imagined

More Praise

We readers love Jesse Lee Kercheval’s many books in many genres, her precise and brilliant translations, her memoir/novels/nonfiction, her visual art, her connection to early silent film and her public life as a maker who serves writers through decades. But here, in her sixth collection of poems, she has cut open her heart to call out our human grief and love. And yes, she gives words to death. Please read this magnificent book. There can be no other for our times.

Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems

Jesse Lee Kercheval has traveled from her original French to the English of the United States, which has become the language of her poetry. Like a fruit—like a tangerine that peels itself—she sheds layers of language and accesses a poetry with enormous vitality, sincerity, and transparency.

Circe Maia, author of The Invisible Bridge / El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia

These unmasked, honest conversations with the dead and the living expose the bare bones of grief and come to terms with nothing less than life.

Yana Ellis, Northwest Review

Table of Contents

Sample

80 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

January, 2023

isbn : 9780822967071

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

Poetry / Women Authors

about the author

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. She is the author of America that island off the coast of France and Dog Angel and the translator of Love Poems by Idea Vilariño and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia. A bilingual Spanish-English edition of her selected poems, La crisis es el cuerpo, translated by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, was published in Argentina and is forthcoming in Mexico. She is also the author of the Alex Award–winning memoir Space and the short story collection Underground Women.

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