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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
America That Island Off the Coast of France

America That Island Off the Coast of France

Paperback

Biographies GeneralGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 1946482242
ISBN13: 9781946482242
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Published: Sep 1 2019
Pages: 92
Weight: 0.34
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
America that island off the coast of France hurtles across literary and linguistic borders, toward a lyricism that slows down experience to create a new form of elegiac memoir. Born in France, raised in Florida, Jesse Lee Kercheval now divides her time between the U.S. and Uruguay. Her poems speak to the impossibility of emigration, of ever being the citizen of only one country. Against the backdrops of Paris, Montevideo, and Florida, these poems explore citizenship and homelessness, motherhood and self, family and freedom. As the poems go from one place to another, they also connect places together; they mirror and combine images, imitate other poets and draw out long, original lines of reflecting and describing. Kercheval turns 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 places like France and America. Even though places might be similar, or a poet might connect them, Kercheval still wonders, in her poem The Red Balloon is leaving / ever painless? Is returning?

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General Poetry