Jesse Lee Kercheval: "Bang"

The Poem of the Week is Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “Bang,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue (Volume V, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She also was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Wisconsin.

Kercheval has published two full-length collections of poetry, World as Dictionary (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1999) and Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), as well as two poetry chapbooks, Chartreuse (Hollyridge Press, 2005) and Film History as Train Wreck (Center for Book Arts, 2006). She also is the author of two short story collections, Alice in Dairyland (2007)—which won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was published by the University of Nebraska Press—and The Dogeater (University of Missouri Press, 1987), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction. Space (Alonquin Books, 1998), a book of memoirs, won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. A novel, The Museum of Happiness (2003), was published by the University of Wisconsin Press as part of the Library of American Fiction.

Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Chicago Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, and Virginia Quarterly Review. In addition, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Research and Study Center at Harvard, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Corporation of Yaddo, and James A. Michener and the Copernicus Society. For further information about Jesse Lee Kercheval and more writing samples, readers are encouraged to visit her website.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.