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Cover of collection

I Want To Tell You

Community Room 301 & 302

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. 

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her poetry collections include America that island off the coast of France and Dog Angel, Her translations include 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 by Editorial Bajo la luna and is forthcoming in Mexico. She is also the author of the memoir Space, which won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and the short story collection Underground Women. She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the coeditor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series at the University of Wisconsin Press.

Recent Book
I Want to Tell You