Cinema Muto

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Cinema Muto poetry “This miraculous work—each poem a transformation of script into story, silent film into loud life—is the one book you MUST read this year.”—Hilda Raz, author of All Odd and Splendid “Cinema Muto, Jesse Lee Kercheval’s astonishingly moving and personal paean to silent film, succeeds in‘saving silence,’ as her first poem announces, while also, paradoxically, giving it a contemporary voice. This book is a fascinating look at silent film that is also, as is all good poetry, a journey of self-discovery.”—Sharon Dolin, author of Burn and Dodge “Jesse Lee Kercheval’s Cinema Muto is a richly complex and marvelously inventive sequence—proudly sui generis in its ability to combine a quirky and individual lyric voice with a novelistic narrative. We can’t help but delight in the book’s surprises and genre-hopping, but Kercheval’s ultimate intent is elegiac: the book is not merely a lament for a lost art form, but a bittersweet reckoning with all things transient, including ourselves.”— David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004 Jesse Lee Kercheval is the award-winning author of The Alice Stories and Space: A Memoir. She is the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry—Open Competition Award Printed in the United States of America Cover photo: Natalie Kovanko and Ivan Mosjoukine, from a postcard to promote the 1926 movie Michel Strogoff, directed by Victor Tourjansky Southern Illinois University Press 1915 University Press Drive Mail Code 6806 Carbondale, IL 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress poems by J e s s e L e e K e r c h e va l K e r c h e va l C i n e m a Mu to Southern Illinois University Press isbn: 0-8093-2895-x isbn: 978-0-8093-2895-6 $14.95 usd dan h. fuller ...