The Perfect Life, Lyric Essays

$19.95

by Peter Stitt

Life in Art Series

Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that ideal, writing of books he has loved and of the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores the quest for freedom in thought and action among the Amish, the French partisans, and the “heretical” Cathars, and he offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter.

by Peter Stitt

Life in Art Series

Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that ideal, writing of books he has loved and of the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores the quest for freedom in thought and action among the Amish, the French partisans, and the “heretical” Cathars, and he offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter.

About the Author

Peter Stitt is the founding and ongoing editor of The Gettysburg Review and the author of two books on American poetry, The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty (Georgia, 1987), cited by The New York Times Book Review as a notable book of the year; and Uncertainty and Plenitude (Iowa, 1997). He is a professor of English at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

Advanced Praise

“In his quest for the perfect life, Stitt takes us across the bridge of his own depression, through losses, disappointments, and connections between his life and the lives of the poets with whom he has a physical and supernal (a Poe term) relationship. It becomes a tunnel where we hear the echo of the musicality of Poe, feel the wind of Wright’s words, and hear the screams of a terrified child who scratches us then reaches for our hand.” — Kai White, Foreword Reviews

“In his first essay collection, Gettysburg College poet and professor of English Stitt, founding and current editor of the Gettysburg Review, rakes over his life in these exercises of genre indirection and faction (fiction + fact). Stitt (The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty) returns to his old stomping grounds of Poe, Wright, Austen, and Frost, dissecting their actions as well as their prose and sex lives. Deep satisfaction comes from watching Stitt pull Poe apart ligament by ligament, testifying to Poe’s arrogance, but proving that the poet was a victim, instead of the typical ‘libertine.’ With the death lurking in each essay, Stitt’s writings do not examine the perfect life but its inverse, through murky lenses of disappointment, divorce, suicide, and cancer. Rife with engaging moments of self-reflection, and occasional unsophisticated interjections that creep into otherwise objective narratives, Stitt’s prose can be disappointingly thin on the sentence-level, despite the overall formal strength and truth of each essay.”— Publishers Weekly

“The Perfect Life is no miscellany. Its very personal narrator is a wanderer in time as well as place—from the mysteries of childhood to the failures of an adult; from the American Midwest and Gettysburg to enclaves in Sonoran Mexico and the region of the Languedoc. All the pieces here are of a piece. Along the way there are poignant portraits of some of our most significant poets and precise meditations on examples of war. What connects the disparate parts of Stitt’s journey is a lyric intelligence unafraid of self-analysis, in stories that do not turn away and in prose that does not yield” — Stanley Plumly

“This deviously serious stealth memoir cum literary whodunit is light as a feather” — Suzannah Lessard

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-36-3