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?” “In these poems, the Eiffel Tower is also a palm tree in Florida, just as snow collecting on Wisconsin s frozen sidewalks is the same water flowing through the Canal St-Martin. America that island off the coast of France collapses here with there, now with then, interweaving Kercheval s family history (births, deaths, romances) with the history of Paris (with all its light and music and subterranean ossuaries). No other living poet can quite equal Kercheval s gift for blending melancholy and vivacity, especially in the handful of exultant, kaleidoscopic long poems that anchor this stunning book.” --Nick Lantz author of You, Beast “These poems are alive. What does that mean? They live on the page, yes, but also in memory, long after the book is closed. The voice is so strong; it refuses to leave the body of the reader. These poems do many things: they are worldly and local, funny and tragic, off-beat and dead-serious. Are they French poems in Brooklyn or South Dakota? No. Are they American poems that play ping-pong with the French? No. They are simply very good poems. Lots and lots of very good poems. This book has something new to offer on every single page.” --Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa “America that island off the coast of France is a book of searching and compassionate poems laced with the most robust wit. You’ll never look at Paris the same way again or even this world when we see a city depicted as ‘the egg. / Wide or narrow, it is a ribbon / of pastry, of moonlight, of butter.’ This jubilant collection transforms and brilliantly guides us in love and sorrows across the hemisphere and back again, gently reminding us, ‘I am wearing skin not/ just clothes/ Never mind the wrinkles in both...’” --Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of At the Drive-In Volcano and Oceanic Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and translator, specializing in the poetry of Uruguay. Her most recent book of poetry is AMERICA THAT ISLAND OFF THE COAST OF FRANCE (Tupelo Press, 2019). Her previous translations include REBORN IN INK by Laura Cesarco Eglin (The Word Works, 2019) and FABLE OF AN INCONSOLABLE MAN by Javier Etchevarren (Action Books, 2017). She is the author of the fiction book BRAZIL (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010) and co- editor of TRUSTING ON THE WIDE AIR: POEMS OF URUGUAY (Dialogos / Lavender Ink, 2019) and EARTH, WATER AND SKY: A BILINGUAL ANTHOLOGY OF ENVIRONMENTAL POETRY (Dialogos / Lavender Ink, 2016). Her additional works include the bilingual Spanish/ English poetry collection Extranjera / Stranger, the poetry collection Cinema Muto, winner of a Crab Orchard Open Selection Award, The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize, Dog Angel , Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and the short story collection The Dogeater, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction. She is currently Zona Gale Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.