I Want to Tell You

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