Potted Meat

by Steven Dunn

Potted Meat, a novel set in a decaying town in southern West Virginia, follows a young boy into adolescence as he struggles with abusive parents, poverty, alcohol addiction, and racial tensions. Using fragments as a narrative mode to highlight the terror of ellipses, Potted Meat explores the fear, power, and vulnerability of storytelling, and in doing so, investigates the peculiar tensions of the body: How we seek to escape or remain embodied during repeated trauma.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

134 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please don't let this one fall between the cracks of whatever shit keeps you from it!!!
This is brilliant, mesmerizing, and unforgettable! Dunn rocks it in every way!
Get a copy of 'Potted Meat'!!!!
Here are some quotes and let me tell you there are no weak lines!!! This novel brings to life a neighborhood, a family, a life, a way to exist!!!
One of the best I've read in a long while!
PLOT
"Miss Janice died this morning. She fell asleep and crashed her car into the creek. They don't know if she drowned or died on impact. Mr. Ray died yesterday. He just died. The day before yesterday Malik died. He was driving and fell asleep and got hit by a semi. Lord I tell ya, Grandma says, Death happens in threes.

Does she mean only people. Only people we know, or people in general. If it's people we know she might be wrong because Aunt Ruth died last Friday. I want to die on impact. If she means people in general, that might be wrong too because all those people just died at that school in Colorado. I think the news said 12, or 21. Either way, 12 or 21 are multiples of 3."

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Potted Meat‘s author Steven Dunn is a recurring visitor to the monthly FBomb flash fiction series at the Mercury Cafe, on occasion serving as host, and the incomparable nature of his first offering may stand as testament to the excellence of the FBomb series, and the disparate authors collected under that banner. Dunn’s book is set in a decaying town in West Virginia, and while the narrative is contiguous, the action unfolds elliptically, in fluttering shots, like a reel of film unwinding. The reel is divided into three segments, 1. LIFT TAB 2. PEEL BACK 3. ENJOY CONTENTS. The author’s voice is spare and evenly balanced, conveying essentials without overstating.
“Every day after me and Grandad sit on the porch and eat fried green tomatoes, my cousin teaches me how to draw.”
That’s the first sentence.
“I get in the car, nod at Leonard and Dee. And my recruiter pulls off.”
Those are the last two, as the protagonist is whisked off into a new life away from his moribund roots.
In between them is one of the best original works of prose this reporter has come across locally since the halcyon days of Don Becker and Phillip Duncan, speaking as a former insider, not that there’s any comparison between any one of these writers to another, but that each embodies a level of worth accessible to all, despite their differences, one to another. To which this reporter will add that his discovery of the greatness of FBomb was truly encouraging as to the notion of hidden pockets of greatness persisting irrepressibly in Denver, whether or not one pays attention. What! Potted Meat is a perceptibly heartfelt work, presumably largely or entirely based in personal experience, Dunn having been young in West Virginia himself, and has tangible impact on the reader, as here:
Everyone is downstairs crying. I walk upstairs to Grandma’s room. It is dark. Her dirty pink house shoes are lined up by the nightstand like she just got into bed. The covers on her side are pulled back like she just got out of bad. I leave and ask my mom how Grandma died. My mom says she just turned yellow and died, What, I say. You heard me, she says, she just turned yellow and died. I will never eat dandelions again.
That’s the entirety of a chapter in Potted Meat called “Yellow.” Dunn’s writing is CONTINUED AT THE LINK BELOW
http://www.examiner.com/review/potted...

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give Potted Meat six stars, if I could. Dunn's debut novel is poetic, hilarious, heartbreaking, and beautiful, often all at once. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

[Babak · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this recently for the second time. One of my favourite books about childhood and coming of age. More people need to read this wonderful book

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will stay with me forever. Brutal and touching, Dunn has peeled back the lid and revealed the potted meat that was a bleak childhood. Absolutely haunting.

[C.L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goddamn, what a beautiful book.

[O'Brian Gunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was excited as all get out to read Potted Meat after meeting Steven at an open mic in Denver. His unadulterated, full-bodied personality shines through in every word of his work, refreshingly so.

I was born and raised in Alabama, and while Potted Meat didn't necessarily remind me of exact memories of my childhood, it contained the essence of the environment I grew up in. The main character and I don't come from the exact same background, but we did come from similar circumstances.

Something I really enjoyed about this book is the fragmented narrative, the vignettes that give the reader a potent idea of who this character is. Some lines were unexpected (for all the right reasons) and gnawed at my eyes for a few minutes before I could move on. While I would have loved to take an even deeper dive into the inner workings of the main character, I also realize that it may have been a bit too painful for him to take a deeper dive into how his childhood and the people in it have truly impacted him and his psyche, that may be something that has to wait until a time and place when he's ready.

Steven, you've got a reader for life here. Keep doin' whatcha doin', and I'll keep reading and sharing the Potted Gospel.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew me away. I've had the great fortune of reading with author Steven Dunn on two, perhaps more, occasions. I'm always stunned by his work read aloud, and his words on the page do not disappoint. These linked stories, in short verse chapters, are set in West Virginia, and are resilient testimonials about a narrator who rises above so many struggles and trauma that exists in every twist and turn. I'm so grateful for this book, Potted Meat, and to know Steven personally makes me feel all the more complete.

[Bud Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal book. Stephen Dunn's Potted Meat is so damn potent, tough, wild, and beautiful. It's told in vignettes of 500 words or so, give or take, but the way Stephen Dunn writes, his five hundred words are worth other people's 5000 words. Mostly this book is a coming of age story, set in West Virginia. My favorite part of Potted Meat was when the young narrator decides he wants to be a ninja, so he leaves in the night to try and find the ninja on the mountain with the campfire. When he gets to the campfire he finds out that the ninja isn't what he thought it'd be. And yeah, that's life.

[Meghan Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Potted Meat is one of those books I will re-read every few months as a supreme example of how to write, what I want to write, and why I want to write. Steven Dunn's writing is so thick with life: the uncanny beauty of detritus; the sting of rejections and betrayals from people we want to be generous toward; the accumulations of shadows we grasp at and try to fit over our own; all the things that we try to re-live, and re-channel, and be to fulfill those we love; the longing and hilarity in our attempts to communicate.

[Scott Mcclanahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is so great. Loved it.

[Maddie Parker]

I truly don't know hwo to rate this book, hate GoodReads for not giving me half stars. So beautiful and crazily written. it reads like an autobiographical book of essays, so when you snap out and remember it's a novel, it makes it even more impressive. A lot of the parts were so amazing, but I definitely wouldn't read this book leisurely right now, it is a little bit harder to follow and get really stuck in because of the formatting.

[Adam Hulse · Rating 4 out of 5]

The format of this book threw me at first but I enjoyed it once I locked in. It has a raw and unflinching honesty about it that can lead to some uncomfortable moments but you soon realise its all conveyed with a "that's just how it was" shrug from the author. Part journal, part poetry, Potted Meat felt like a more modern day Bukowski book and that is no bad thing if you have the stomach for it.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the prose.

[Mridula · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting read. Steven Dunn gives the reader a splintered glimpse into a boy's poor and violent childhood. There are some sweet moments and some horror, some 'wow's and some mm-hmms.

I found a rhythm in Dunn's creative writing. At times it felt like I was reading a stanza or a song. The language was purposeful and the stories, memorable.

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gut punch of a novel. Visceral, raw, funny. The prose throbs with pain and truth.

[Tauri Hagemann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was pretty okay, but I was definitely not the target audience for it. If I hadn’t had to read it for a class, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up.

[Ethan]

I’m honestly not sure how to rate this. I do think it’s a good book, but it just kinda left me feeling a bit hollow inside (a.k.a. depressed)

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dunn's words ride right on top of the pulse of the story. It's all so vivid; it felt like I could reach out and touch it, just so real. I love his narrative voice too. Whether humorous, insightful, or brutal, and there's all of that at various times and more, I could read whatever Dunn is saying all day. It's some damn fine writing and an excellent book.

[F(r)iction F(r)iction]

Steven Dunn answered questions over on our forum as our Celebrity Mentor: http://tetheredbyletters.com/author-q...

You can also read our interview with Steven Dunn here: http://tetheredbyletters.com/author-q...

[Kenning JP Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A coming of age story with all the dirt and grime attached. Dunn doesn't turn away from the nasty bits and yet still there's a lot of silliness and happiness tucked into a sort of sad tale. If you grew up poor and black, then this is the John Hughes sort of book for you.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

An elliptical catalog of hurt. I wish this had continued further into his escape from circumstances.

[Andrew Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love when I find a book that tells its story in a unique way. POTTED MEAT by Steven Dunn will immerse you in West Virginia culture and storytelling in all the best ways.

[Brice Maiurro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve met Steven Dunn only one time. He was smoking a cigarette outside of the Mercury Cafe after the locally renowned F Bomb Flash Fiction Open Mic. He told me and a group huddled up in the cold how his book had recently been picked up for publication. He spoke humbly about it, but you could see the excitement in his face through it all; the cold, the lights of the Mercury Cafe hanging over us, the cigarette smoke.

The book, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, is called Potted Meat, a novel in the form of a few dozen short stories, and I can tell you from my weekly recommendations of it to friends, family, strangers on the light rail, anyone willing to listen really, that the title garners some interesting reactions. People have said everything to me from “What the heck is potted meat?” to “Gross…”

To all of them, I reaffirm, “I know, but read the book.”

The cover art, pictured above, is no less off-putting. It would be sleek and almost sexy if not for the giant chunk of meat with strangeness protruding from it at all angles. In my opinion, Dunn couldn’t have picked a better title and image for his first novel – which is as sentimental as it is jarring.

Through the short episodic pieces in Potted Meat, Dunn establishes a narrative of coming-of-age in West Virginia. One such story is “Happy Little Trees” which Dunn begins:

Bob Ross is on. He has paint. I don’t.

These short sentences comprise a large part of the novel. Simple, but full of strong, cut-and-dry imagery. Swift, deep punches that minimalist writers like Hemingway would be proud of. Dunn goes on to describe how he pulls in whatever he can from nature, including grasshoppers for green ink, and dandelions for yellow ink, to make up for his lack of paint. Even in the gritty images of a young boy desperate enough for colors that he is eating bugs, we begin to see a picture of what growing up without might have looked like for Dunn. A theme continued in several instances, including the eating of the titular potted meat.

Jumping into the novel, short stories like “Happy Little Trees” might seem random, but it’s a mistake to think that Dunn doesn’t want to leave the reader with a certain sense of confusion. Where the real power in Potted Meat comes into play is when the images that Dunn has written into your memory in permanent ink come back to bite you in the butt. One such example is in “Yellow” where Dunn retells the story of finding his grandmother had died. When asking his mom what happened she says “…she just turned yellow and died.” Dunn, in response, vows “to never eat dandelions again.”

Dunn’s language is the kind of simple that when you’re done with the novel you might think to yourself, “I could have written that,” but the amount of power in the intentionally terse and often child-like language of the book is something that is not so easily filtered from head to paper. Between the short sentences, the anecdotal reprisal of memories and the dark humor hiding beneath Dunn’s matter-of-fact presentation is a true craft and authenticity that can drive any reader to care about the day-to-day plight of a young boy coming of age through all sorts of strange adversity.

I think back to meeting Dunn before ever reading this breakthrough novel. I think about the humble way he took drags from that cigarette, shirking off our excitement of the news of his book finding a publisher. That humility, that quiet genius is what sneaks up on you in each intentional word and each short story, some of which are no longer than a page, between the front and back cover of Potted Meat. Steven Dunn has created something worthwhile that shows a true dedication to capturing the feelings of his childhood and putting them in a small tin can for us to digest, one harsh bite at a time. I guess, in short,

Steven Dunn is on. His writing has paint. Yours don’t.

[John Tipper · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of episodic pieces in the present tense. The unnamed narrator is an African American boy. It's a compelling story of a childhood mired in poverty in what seems like a coal camp that is in decline in West Virginia. The boy's stepdad abuses him, beating him a switch and an electrical cord. His mother tends to use a lot of profanity when scolding him. He lives in a cramped house on the side of a hill, with two sisters and a brother. The youth listens to rap music and gets involved in the gangster ethos, taking drugs, drinking, and helping a drug pusher. He lands a job on a trash collecting truck. He gets dirty by gross things in the garbage. Dun writes about tough topics, violence, racism, and abuse. But the structure is difficult to follow. The narrative thread is weak. The short novel is experimental, reminding me of the works of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., and Alain Robbe-Grillet. It's bleak view of reality may turn some readers off. Recommended to those into avant-garde works.

[Julia T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steven Dunn's book, Potted Meat, is made up of story bits detailing the protagonist's coming of age in a small town in West Virginia with rich environmental and cultural themes including violence, race, addition, sex, gender, etc.

The book is divided into three sections, each beginning with an instructional sentence on how to digest the potted meat/ the prose accompanied by the titles of each vignette.

The vignettes sear and the titles are absolutely perfect, begging the question --did Dunn right the titles first? second? did he match them with the vignettes.

Dunn's prose is most powerful in it's piercing precision, ruthless matter-of-factness, vivid imagery, and what's held back and not said, which illuminates the themes and what's being said in such a poignant way.

When reading, the reader doesn't get every detail, just enough, and the blank space provides room to breath and digest the grotesque, violent, scathing potted meat.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brutal glimpse into growing up poor and surrounded by sickness, addiction and domestic abuse. Many writers would spin this through our culture's well-worn bildungsroman genre engine and cull up scenes of endless heartbreak and sympathy.

Steven Dunn isn't interested in that.

Instead, we get tiny flashes of his childhood, most of them bled free of the sort of emotional appeals and editorialization we expect from this kind of writing. Potted Meat gets right into the chaotic otherness of Dunn's childhood. We are given little context and no one to really 'sympathize' with. We just observe as a traumatic childhood and adolescence slowly accretes across tiny staccato moments and interactions. Much like in life itself, we are left to ourselves here to judge what the value or significance of any particular moment may be.

Don't dare call it a memoir, more of an impression, etched in acid.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Story of growing up in a dysfunctional family, told with the naive acceptance of brutality and violence that children who know nothing else are capable of. All laid bare, kindness, sex and love without sentimentality, rather about survival and sibling or friend solidarity. Monstrous parents, family rituals enacting unknown secrets--the reader is left wondering WTF in sync with the children experiencing it.

The writing is terse and varied, switching between prose and poetry and cryptically incomplete sentences. Nevertheless, a story unfolds, children mature, transcend, outsmart the monsters. Sometimes. There is comeuppance and comedy in failure, futility, dementia (which I especially thought was hilarious). And then there's the inevitable goodbye that ends childhood.

Is it auto-biographical? There are hints, like where the book ends with the Air Force and the bio begins with it.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat is the sort of novel-in-vignettes a lot of people have tried and failed to write—and is one of the best books I’ve read. One of the reasons Potted Meat works so well is because of its expert looping mechanisms, repeated hooks and rhythms that also work as the conceptual catch-and-release of the protagonist within his landscape. It also does some expert handling of its heaviness—abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and dead-endings in a poor, black community in rural West Virginia—within the dislocated and half-aware levity of a kid coming of age.

[Johanna DeBiase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in vignettes, reminding me of Cisnero's House on Mango Street, a beautifully created novel of childhood of a third-generation African-American boy in Appalachia, specifically West Virginia. First-person present tense the protagonist seems unaware of how truly alarming his life is, but I felt the adult author looking in on the child with the knowledge of someone who has distance and sees the truth now. Showing us his truth. It's not a happy truth, but it's authentic.