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.
“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
“Falling in love while losing a loved one and watching the war news on TV? Life is difficult, and the poems in this marvelous collection ask a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? Each poem supplies part of the answer—to go looking, to make mistakes, to be confused, to be wounded, to keep moving toward a new life. “The expression of our faces when we almost get to where we are going”—that is the expression we have while reading this book, which has the pace of an intense, anticipated journey, one that acknowledges that language is a problem, that art, science, and history are problems, but nonetheless many disparate lives, both past and present, somehow meld into one small life lived, and when that life speaks—“mouth deliver us to the present”—we sit up and listen, for the experience of reading has handed us a strange joy.”
“Possesses a haunted urgency that, as one careens through its poems like a semi navigating mountain roads, suspends one between what we cannot know about being human and what we cling to as gospel. Gospel’s an accurate word for Lester’s verse. He explores language, love, grief, and Lester’s adopted home state of West Virginia.”
“Keegan Lester is one of the best young poets around. Tender and wild, this shouldn’t be beautiful/but it was/and it was all i had/so i drew it pops and bleeds with poems full of mothers and ghosts,time machines and asshole poets. This a book that knows it’s a hell of a lot better to write about Jenny Lewis or Abelard or a cousin who drops acid than something that doesn’t belong to you. It’s a book full of magic tricks and walking forward. Open it up and see. Don’t worry. It’s good to be free.”
“Heart-rooted in West Virginia but itinerant in its limbs, this shouldn’t be beautiful… is riddled with insight, full of America, made of dazzling cadences, and graced by a “perpetual openness” like that which Emerson ascribes to the Transcendentalist, along with a belief ‘in inspiration, and in ecstasy.’ Keegan Lester is just the kind of poet we need right now—and this is inspired, ecstatic poetry.”
“A precious artifact, something you handle with care because you know it’s one of a kind and that the slightest upset could ruin it – you become protective, you become excited, there are moments you need to catch your breath. In the last year or so language has become synonymous with hate, it’s poets like Keegan Lester that remind us of the love inherent in shaping language.”
““‘Science alongside ghosts and god particles. Math-filled dreams. Reality and television. Imagination and activity. Pretending and playing. Love and war. This poetry is in service to a better world in that it teaches us how to connect beyond false binaries. At the core of Lester’s work is an understanding of global suffering. …’ ‘these poems are necessary; they unearth what’s real in our world, not just what is typical or expected. In these poems, constructs like past and present are collapsed, as are the lives of the living and the ghosting. One gets the sense that Lester is not just drawing this world for beauty’s sake, but out of necessity to transmute that beauty into language.’” ”
“Lester’s poems read like sheet music so that you feel the notes as your eyes take them in. The language flows in almost pure rhythm. The reader doesn’t so much explore these poems as experience them. They dance, they sing, they trill. They rise and fall in tempo. It’s really quite a performance.”