Dog Angel: Poems / Edition 1

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822958406
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/21/2004
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.27(d)

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.

Table of Contents

I
	Enter Mecca	3
II
	Not	7
	The Rented Car	9
	Olive	12
	Happy Hour	13
	The Hotel Where My Family Used to Stay	15
	Once Upon a Time I Had a White Comb	16
	I Open Your Death Like a Book	18
	Rose Red	20
	Bread	21
	Blue Plate	23
III
	Notes from a Lecture on Rilke's Requiems	27
IV
	16 Hours in Bradford, Pennsylvania	35
V
	In the Gardens of the Alcazar	45
	Magdalena at the Prado	46
	What Max, Age Two, Remembers about Spain	48
	La Festividad de los Tres Reyes	50
	Florida	54
	The Steeplejack	56
	3 Reflections God Might See in My Living-Room Window	58
	Clocks	60
	When the dead come back	62
	Pump	65
	Small Treatise on the Usefulness of Language	67
	August in My Neighbor's Garden	68
	I Dream My Children Are Giving Me a Final Exam	70
VI
	The Great Molasses Flood	73

Editorial Reviews

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.”
—Prairie Schooner


“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.”
—Capital Times

From the Publisher