Perfect Dirt: And Other Things I've Gotten Wrong
Keegan Lester
(Author)
Description
Recounted with humor and honesty, Lester invites us into his life as he struggles with masculinity and searches for a place where he fits. Words have meaning and meaning evolves over time. In Perfect Dirt, Keegan Lester drags us through his failure to grasp the meaning that always seems to be just beyond his fingertips. These lyrical vignettes depict a lifelong search for home, identity, and the language to say the things we wish we could tell people in the moment. Born in Southern California to parents who had migrated from West Virginia and South Florida, Lester spent summers with his grandparents in Morgantown, which instilled a deep anchor of place that continued to call to him, an Appalachian at heart even while living in New York City as a poet. As small successes started to come his way--a book and numerous tours--so did crises. Lester's father, meanwhile, experiencing his own life crisis, embarked on a journey to sail the Caribbean. Both end up lost. Part memoir, part tour diary, part homage to the places and people who have made him who he is, Perfect Dirt digs into the sometimes painful, sometimes jubilant questions of identity and success. This is a book searching to better understand the world and our place in it, the family we're born into, and the family we make along the way. Hear the author read an excerpt from the Perfect Dirt.
Product Details
Price
$23.99
Publisher
West Virginia University Press
Publish Date
November 01, 2021
Pages
272
Dimensions
4.9 X 8.0 X 0.7 inches | 0.65 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781952271298
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Keegan Lester is the author of this shouldn't be beautiful but it was and it was all i had so i drew it, selected by Mary Ruefle for the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize. His writing has been published in Ploughshares, the Boston Review, Cutbank, Hobart, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. He lives in New York City.
Reviews
"In Perfect Dirt, tenderness is so tangible, so electric. You feel it when a grandpa hoists a young Keegan Lester up so he can feed wild horses sugar cubes, you hear it when a grandma speaks thunder, it embraces you each time Lester holds close the good people of West Virginia. But this tenderness is also thorny: it sparks in the quiet togetherness of men, it leaps around a father lost at sea, it underscores loss and regret. Keegan Lester is an immensely gifted writer. This book will stay with you."
Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
"Keegan Lester's writing and storytelling about West Virginia and its people feel how West Virginia's landscape feels to me--like I'm being hugged and protected. Perfect Dirt reminds us that we can love a place and still be critical when it's done out of love and tenderness. This book has brought me back home in the best ways, with a newer, more open heart, mind, and body."
Steven Dunn, author of water & power
Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
"Keegan Lester's writing and storytelling about West Virginia and its people feel how West Virginia's landscape feels to me--like I'm being hugged and protected. Perfect Dirt reminds us that we can love a place and still be critical when it's done out of love and tenderness. This book has brought me back home in the best ways, with a newer, more open heart, mind, and body."
Steven Dunn, author of water & power
"Places are fleshed out alongside people, with West Virginia being the book's star. . . . In breathtaking, nuanced prose, Lester tackles the human experience. . . . Powerful and insightful."
Foreword Review
"Reading Perfect Dirt is like a long, beautiful conversation with a stranger you just met at a backyard barbeque. . . . There's an effervescence of beautiful sentences in this book, an optimism that tugboats you from one scene to the next. . . . His longings remind me of Breece D'J Pancake."
Adroit Journal