My Coolest Shirt

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. Tenderness, frustration, and the love of love itself inspire these gritty lyrics. 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.