Kelly Cherry: 7 books

“Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.”—Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry...

Kelly Cherry, who studied philosophy in graduate school at the University of Virginia, has never lost her deep love of the subject; The Retreats of Thought takes the reader through the philosophical domain. What do we really know of our world? Why is there anything at all? What is time? What is a...

Winner of the 2013 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award In her ninth collection of poetry, Kelly Cherry explores the domain of language. Clear and accessible, the poems in The Life and Death of Poetry examine the intricacies and limitations of communication and its ability to help us transcend our world...

Is there any hope for a hypereducated thirty-year-old med student who would like nothing better than to be taken seriously sexually? That's what Mary "Tennessee" Settleworth, the dislocated heroine of this unsettling and wryly comic first novel, is wondering. Tennessee, a native of Knoxville, is an all-around...

The seven stories in The Woman Who take a close and sharp look at the complex relationships between art and reality, between imagination and identity. They offer illuminating glimpses of that old and continuing mystery, the creating mind. Kate, an editor, must stabilize her sense of self after being...

In The Wink of an Eye is a modern fable in the form of a novel. Or a romantic satire. Or a social burlesque. Or an ironic fantasy. Or all of the above. Whatever the label, it's a joy to read. This tale is about a revolution—a small, upstart, none-too-promising revolution—that succeeds too well. A...

A newly married young couple-she is a flutist, he is a graduate student-try to reconcile their differing backgrounds and attitudes. This leads to much merriment and a certain amount of sorrow. The book is set in New York City in the late sixties, with love-ins, riots, performance artists, and assassinations....