My Coolest Shirt

Poetry. W.T. Pfefferle portrays love as a road trip, in poems both funny and dark. Zigzagging along in his Pontiac on "Superstition Highway," the speaker struggles between past loves and current, between "My Bad Girlfriend" and the call of more perfect love. Says Frederick Barthelme: "My Coolest Shirt is a conflation of privacies—one minute a sad country song, the next a postmodern stab, then a lovely embracing memory of romance. The poems are utterly modern, uncommonly clear, affectionate to a fault, and profoundly compassionate. The book just stuns." Adds Nicole Cooley, "Pfefferle takes us on a wild ride, through California, Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Mississippi, and beyond. Be ready to meet Glen Campbell, Barbara Eden, Napoleon, and Columbus. This book surprises and delights us with what can be saved from the journey." David St. John describes these poems as echoing "like the refrains of songs we can almost remember, melodies now somehow lost in our past, doomed always to stay just out of reach." Angela Ball concludes, "If love like a ballad repeats to you how to go wrong beautifully one more time, this book should be yours."

W.T. Pfefferle is the author of MY COOLEST SHIRT (The Word Works, 2015). Pfefferle's first book, The Meager Life and Modest Times of Pop Thorndale, won the Stevens Manuscript Prize in 2007. In 2004, he published Poets on Place, the story of his year-long trip around America interviewing and photographing American poets in their native habitats. Pfefferle also wrote Writing What Matters, a college writing textbook. He works as a college professor, including as the past Director of Expository Writing at the Johns Hopkins University, and poetry and writing professor at Georgetown College. He's a graduate of the Center for Writers Ph.D. program at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned his MFA at the American University. His poetry has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, North American Review, Nimrod, Mississippi Review, and other journals.