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this shouldn't be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it
"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."--Mary Ruefle
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published February 8, 2017
2 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Keegan Lester
2 books2 followersKeegan Lester is a poet who splits his time between New York City and Morgantown, West Virginia. Mary Ruefle selected his first collection of poetry for the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize.
His work has appeared in the Boston Review, The Atlas Review, Powder Keg, Boaat Journal, The Journal, Phantom Books, Tinderbox, CutBank, Reality Beach, and Sixth Finch (among others), and he has been featured on NPR, The New School Writing Blog, and ColdFront Mag. His manuscript “We Both Go Together if One Falls Down” was a finalist for the 2016 Georgia Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2014 coconut books Braddock Prize, and a semi-finalist for the BOAAT Book Prize.
He is co-founder and poetry editor of the journal Souvenir Lit and performs monthly with the New York City Poetry Brothel. He's taught at Stonehill College and was a mentor for the 2016 Adroit Journal Summer High School Mentorship Program. He earned his MFA from Columbia University.
His work has appeared in the Boston Review, The Atlas Review, Powder Keg, Boaat Journal, The Journal, Phantom Books, Tinderbox, CutBank, Reality Beach, and Sixth Finch (among others), and he has been featured on NPR, The New School Writing Blog, and ColdFront Mag. His manuscript “We Both Go Together if One Falls Down” was a finalist for the 2016 Georgia Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2014 coconut books Braddock Prize, and a semi-finalist for the BOAAT Book Prize.
He is co-founder and poetry editor of the journal Souvenir Lit and performs monthly with the New York City Poetry Brothel. He's taught at Stonehill College and was a mentor for the 2016 Adroit Journal Summer High School Mentorship Program. He earned his MFA from Columbia University.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 27, 2017
Keegan Lester is a star.
February 24, 2018
In this “post-truth” era, I’m drawn increasingly to collections of poetry that feel more like a good conversation than an artistic exercise. The news, from sexual assault revelations to climate disaster, makes me feel fragile and small. I’m looking for poems that empathize with loneliness and offer a cure in the form of companionship. Keegan Lester’s first book, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions, 2017), is everything I need right now. His poems are full of sadness and hope, ghosts and wanderings, and an America that is refreshingly nuanced rather than polarized. Maybe I’m not alone in this need. Right now, we probably all need poems that hold our hand as we walk through the uncertainty.
this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was… is a beautifully designed book. On the cover, the helmet-clad author is about to toss a football, the coming pass seemingly directed right at the reader. It’s a casual game of catch we’re joining, a back-and-forth between author and reader.
Keegan’s poems are filled with loneliness, emptiness, and undoing, but they are equally full of self-discovery and love, learning and hope. The poems are wide-eyed and awed at a world that is both good and bad. Several poems have a string of phrases beginning with “to” in celebration or ode. These sentences, pointing to the miraculous in the everyday, leap associatively and work emotionally on the reader. One poem begins “to my mother painting hummingbirds: the feeding & caring for something else is the art part in all of this”; and ends, “to the games clouds play when people are looking.” These poems make me wish I kept a notebook to list every beautiful thing the world offers up; they make me more likely to notice those beautiful things in the first place.
A majority of the poems fall into a section entitled “Ghost Note,” and are untitled except for the first line. No capital letters; ampersands replace the “ands.” Many long sentences are syntactical fragments. Lester’s language challenges norms and rules, while also being familiar and conversational. Because many of the poems extend over several pages, they nearly flow into each other if you don’t notice that new poems start slightly lower on the page.
The final section, “Coda,” contains three poems with titles, including an “Ars Poetica” as the final poem, which is simply a stunning way to summarize all that the collection accomplishes. Here are some of my favorite lines:“as the shape of two people reaching for something far away, reaching / for something like oranges. as miles from home. as the only thing you ever knew about the wild / is that one needed water & a flashlight because reportedly, people get lost in the wild all the time.” This collection is the hand reaching out to you, a flashlight guiding you so that you don’t get lost.
Lester often weaves past and present, the personal and the vast into one poem, leaping between these seeming opposites. In one poem, we are first fossils: “when they find us we will be trilobites. our hearts & hands & eyes, all small star critters etched / into some rock”; then we’re inside “the mason jars of lightning bugs in the dark. & we, what is swallowed by light.” Through these leaps of time, space, and scale, what remain are intimacy, wonder, and the belief that, even though our lives are brief, they still matter.
If the collection could be accused of anything, it’s having a lot of “ghosts.” In Lester’s poems, ghosts are strangers and loved ones; ghosts are literal and metaphorical. One poem begins, “there are exactly two ghosts waiting / on coughing heating pipes back home / while dawn wests.” The poems are peopled by ghosts because, Lester points out, that is how the people we love stay in our lives.
The poems also crisscross America like one great road trip, with Lester’s speaker in a frequent state of wandering and becoming. It’s fitting that Lester is the co-founder and editor of Souvenir Lit, an online poetry journal “to remind you where you’ve been & the places you’d like to go,” where each poem is accompanied by an anecdote of a souvenir. In moving from West Virginia to California to New York, the poems also create a loving, humanist portrait of America. In Berkeley, California, two lab techs fall in love researching a tumor suppressor gene called brca1 (“look at the variation, look at the movement”), working for both love and test-tube tumors, and in Boston, Massachusetts (“what is boston without a brutal fugue of wind & ice & brick”), the speaker sees a familiar face, or a ghost, in a crowd. Each place the speaker visits is observed with an appreciative and insightful eye; each place becomes a part of him.
Lester also celebrates Americana, particularly football. At one point, he describes a football stadium as “the amalgamation of 70,000 people’s magic realism on the television set,” and there is an entire long poem that claims to be lifted from Friday Night Lights, but really is its own celebration and creation. Lester’s poems love America’s humanity and celebrate its humble stories: “the one thing i know is real is that my grandmother used to steal coal from her father to warm her school house. that was her job: steal coal, so other children could learn to read. when you think of west virginia, think of her.” What a loving portrait.
After zinging around America, Lester’s speaker often returns to Appalachia with love. He apologizes for missing the cherry blossoms, but asks, “how would i have ever been made ready?” Leaving home and exploring the country is what has made the voice and vision of these poems.
In an interview, Lester has said it’s his ambition “to write for a larger audience… to write for people who are non-poets.” I admit I’m a poet, but I believe Lester has accomplished this goal while still challenging the norms of poetry and language. His poems are intuitive—they are felt, rather than puzzled out—and each associative leap balances on the fine line of subtlety and logic. He moves quickly from line to line, starting in one place and ending up in another place entirely, but he never loses his reader along the way. His poems definitely work like a flashlight in wilderness—you are guided through, wide-eyed and surprised at what is illuminated.
As I finished reading the collection, I felt like I’d just had one of those long conversations that are both comforting and exciting, and that remind us of what’s really important about being alive, despite all the noise and bad news we’re bombarded with. The poems in this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it acknowledge that it’s okay to be sad, that the world is a little bit broken anyway, and that there’s still room in the world and our lives for wonder.
Originally published in The Rumpus, 2.16.18
http://therumpus.net/2018/02/this-sho...
this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was… is a beautifully designed book. On the cover, the helmet-clad author is about to toss a football, the coming pass seemingly directed right at the reader. It’s a casual game of catch we’re joining, a back-and-forth between author and reader.
Keegan’s poems are filled with loneliness, emptiness, and undoing, but they are equally full of self-discovery and love, learning and hope. The poems are wide-eyed and awed at a world that is both good and bad. Several poems have a string of phrases beginning with “to” in celebration or ode. These sentences, pointing to the miraculous in the everyday, leap associatively and work emotionally on the reader. One poem begins “to my mother painting hummingbirds: the feeding & caring for something else is the art part in all of this”; and ends, “to the games clouds play when people are looking.” These poems make me wish I kept a notebook to list every beautiful thing the world offers up; they make me more likely to notice those beautiful things in the first place.
A majority of the poems fall into a section entitled “Ghost Note,” and are untitled except for the first line. No capital letters; ampersands replace the “ands.” Many long sentences are syntactical fragments. Lester’s language challenges norms and rules, while also being familiar and conversational. Because many of the poems extend over several pages, they nearly flow into each other if you don’t notice that new poems start slightly lower on the page.
The final section, “Coda,” contains three poems with titles, including an “Ars Poetica” as the final poem, which is simply a stunning way to summarize all that the collection accomplishes. Here are some of my favorite lines:“as the shape of two people reaching for something far away, reaching / for something like oranges. as miles from home. as the only thing you ever knew about the wild / is that one needed water & a flashlight because reportedly, people get lost in the wild all the time.” This collection is the hand reaching out to you, a flashlight guiding you so that you don’t get lost.
Lester often weaves past and present, the personal and the vast into one poem, leaping between these seeming opposites. In one poem, we are first fossils: “when they find us we will be trilobites. our hearts & hands & eyes, all small star critters etched / into some rock”; then we’re inside “the mason jars of lightning bugs in the dark. & we, what is swallowed by light.” Through these leaps of time, space, and scale, what remain are intimacy, wonder, and the belief that, even though our lives are brief, they still matter.
If the collection could be accused of anything, it’s having a lot of “ghosts.” In Lester’s poems, ghosts are strangers and loved ones; ghosts are literal and metaphorical. One poem begins, “there are exactly two ghosts waiting / on coughing heating pipes back home / while dawn wests.” The poems are peopled by ghosts because, Lester points out, that is how the people we love stay in our lives.
The poems also crisscross America like one great road trip, with Lester’s speaker in a frequent state of wandering and becoming. It’s fitting that Lester is the co-founder and editor of Souvenir Lit, an online poetry journal “to remind you where you’ve been & the places you’d like to go,” where each poem is accompanied by an anecdote of a souvenir. In moving from West Virginia to California to New York, the poems also create a loving, humanist portrait of America. In Berkeley, California, two lab techs fall in love researching a tumor suppressor gene called brca1 (“look at the variation, look at the movement”), working for both love and test-tube tumors, and in Boston, Massachusetts (“what is boston without a brutal fugue of wind & ice & brick”), the speaker sees a familiar face, or a ghost, in a crowd. Each place the speaker visits is observed with an appreciative and insightful eye; each place becomes a part of him.
Lester also celebrates Americana, particularly football. At one point, he describes a football stadium as “the amalgamation of 70,000 people’s magic realism on the television set,” and there is an entire long poem that claims to be lifted from Friday Night Lights, but really is its own celebration and creation. Lester’s poems love America’s humanity and celebrate its humble stories: “the one thing i know is real is that my grandmother used to steal coal from her father to warm her school house. that was her job: steal coal, so other children could learn to read. when you think of west virginia, think of her.” What a loving portrait.
After zinging around America, Lester’s speaker often returns to Appalachia with love. He apologizes for missing the cherry blossoms, but asks, “how would i have ever been made ready?” Leaving home and exploring the country is what has made the voice and vision of these poems.
In an interview, Lester has said it’s his ambition “to write for a larger audience… to write for people who are non-poets.” I admit I’m a poet, but I believe Lester has accomplished this goal while still challenging the norms of poetry and language. His poems are intuitive—they are felt, rather than puzzled out—and each associative leap balances on the fine line of subtlety and logic. He moves quickly from line to line, starting in one place and ending up in another place entirely, but he never loses his reader along the way. His poems definitely work like a flashlight in wilderness—you are guided through, wide-eyed and surprised at what is illuminated.
As I finished reading the collection, I felt like I’d just had one of those long conversations that are both comforting and exciting, and that remind us of what’s really important about being alive, despite all the noise and bad news we’re bombarded with. The poems in this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it acknowledge that it’s okay to be sad, that the world is a little bit broken anyway, and that there’s still room in the world and our lives for wonder.
Originally published in The Rumpus, 2.16.18
http://therumpus.net/2018/02/this-sho...
January 14, 2019
A young poet who writes about family, nature, and the human experience in a way I haven’t read recently. Lester is one with the mountains of West Virginia as he is as the streets of NYC, but both are equally gripping and beautiful.
March 16, 2018
Keegan Lester's this shouldn't be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it is a drawing of not just the mind, but the heart in action. It's a book that reminds that to be present in the world, to listen to the buzz of the world around us full of tragedy, yet full of gifts to celebrate.
In many poems, Lester writes as if to a friend: "you took the news like one takes / a secret. you thought on it a while, you buried it in the backyard of your head. // you entered it, sang to it before bed & like all things it grew. // just because we can't see cowboys & unicorns / doesn't mean we shouldn't pray." (From his long poem, "ghost note".) And this is just a taste of how Lester carries music across the vast trail of a long line, knowing where to break in order to pull the truest truths and highest of fantasies. It's a book I think of often.
In many poems, Lester writes as if to a friend: "you took the news like one takes / a secret. you thought on it a while, you buried it in the backyard of your head. // you entered it, sang to it before bed & like all things it grew. // just because we can't see cowboys & unicorns / doesn't mean we shouldn't pray." (From his long poem, "ghost note".) And this is just a taste of how Lester carries music across the vast trail of a long line, knowing where to break in order to pull the truest truths and highest of fantasies. It's a book I think of often.
February 21, 2018
How do you describe a book that breathes? Keegan Lester's "this shouldn't be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it" beckons the reader to experience the extended first section, "ghost note," by freeing her from the assumption that poems have to open and close as cleanly as a door. Instead, they tether together like buoys on a rope—each poem its own landmark for navigation, perfectly individual and vital.
In "Ghost Note" Lester writes,
"there was once the heavens & the ocean. there was once the chicken & the egg,/ there was once the atom & the eve & then gunfire. & then there were the oceans/ & beaches, adams & eves, chicken & eggs, human life & the halting of human life./ there was once two owls in a sugar maple, field mice below & afternoon settling/ behind the mountains, throats cut by the mononghela river, copper blood spilling/ from them. no suture could close this thing, & night soon hid it momentarily./ in the morning the field mice disappeared behind the sleight of hand of the crouching/ owls & the riverbed's copper veins showed & while beautiful, it was easy/ to see the earth would not have the stomach for more of this business & so sold its shares/ & retired to an undisclosed island hiding elvis, tupac & richie valens. when they find us,/ we will all be trilobites. our hearts & hands & eyes, all small star critters etched/ into some rock...."
Lester invents time in the span of a poem then queers our perception: memory versus the present moment, page versus reality, the individual versus the human race, even as we rocket billions of years into the future as fossils. These gorgeous movements jump cut through time with blindingly careful attention to the even the smallest atom/adam.
In another poem he writes,
"she a brazen erupting star, she the sacrifice to appease something that was made/ up. we were asked to wash the priest's hands. to wait until we could see images in the heads of match flame./ no greater enemy exists than the self-conceit of our own wisdom. i was left completely unequipped for what/ to push up against walls, over desks, through black holes. i was left completely unequipped for the becoming/ part, for the end, for the fingertips of the cosmos. the one thing i know is real is that my grandmother used to/ steal coal from her father to warm her school house. that was her job: steal coal, so other children could learn/ to read. when you think of west virginia, think of her.
From dark matter, to a school house heated by stolen coal, the speaker slides us through physical and emotional spaces as deftly as a recording artist laying down levels for a new track. The effect: a West Virginian poet reframing the narrative of his home state, and in doing so, launching perfect planets of language that orbit an empathetic center.
I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand how a book of poetry can be a living cosmos.
In "Ghost Note" Lester writes,
"there was once the heavens & the ocean. there was once the chicken & the egg,/ there was once the atom & the eve & then gunfire. & then there were the oceans/ & beaches, adams & eves, chicken & eggs, human life & the halting of human life./ there was once two owls in a sugar maple, field mice below & afternoon settling/ behind the mountains, throats cut by the mononghela river, copper blood spilling/ from them. no suture could close this thing, & night soon hid it momentarily./ in the morning the field mice disappeared behind the sleight of hand of the crouching/ owls & the riverbed's copper veins showed & while beautiful, it was easy/ to see the earth would not have the stomach for more of this business & so sold its shares/ & retired to an undisclosed island hiding elvis, tupac & richie valens. when they find us,/ we will all be trilobites. our hearts & hands & eyes, all small star critters etched/ into some rock...."
Lester invents time in the span of a poem then queers our perception: memory versus the present moment, page versus reality, the individual versus the human race, even as we rocket billions of years into the future as fossils. These gorgeous movements jump cut through time with blindingly careful attention to the even the smallest atom/adam.
In another poem he writes,
"she a brazen erupting star, she the sacrifice to appease something that was made/ up. we were asked to wash the priest's hands. to wait until we could see images in the heads of match flame./ no greater enemy exists than the self-conceit of our own wisdom. i was left completely unequipped for what/ to push up against walls, over desks, through black holes. i was left completely unequipped for the becoming/ part, for the end, for the fingertips of the cosmos. the one thing i know is real is that my grandmother used to/ steal coal from her father to warm her school house. that was her job: steal coal, so other children could learn/ to read. when you think of west virginia, think of her.
From dark matter, to a school house heated by stolen coal, the speaker slides us through physical and emotional spaces as deftly as a recording artist laying down levels for a new track. The effect: a West Virginian poet reframing the narrative of his home state, and in doing so, launching perfect planets of language that orbit an empathetic center.
I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand how a book of poetry can be a living cosmos.
March 7, 2018
Yo dude, I've been deep in a goodreads vortex and then I saw this beautiful creation. So happy it got drew-ed. Keep rockin' on.
June 24, 2017
Keegan Lester’s debut poetry collection this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it, winner of the 2016 Slope Editions Books Prize, 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. The collection, however, is not coal-dusted or steeped in stereotype, but instead luminous with the acknowledged humanity of Appalachians.
In early 2017, I had the opportunity to see Keegan Lester perform his poems. I use the word "perform" because Lester affects the posture of a backwoods preacher. The words travel through him, rather than from him as if transfused through the mother-lode vein of a word mine.
I picked up the book this morning for a long car ride and tore through the book for the third time. Perhaps it took some time to compose proper thoughts on the collection, but there must be a reason I keep returning. This book is itself a return, a home town not yours but nevertheless intimately familiar.
In early 2017, I had the opportunity to see Keegan Lester perform his poems. I use the word "perform" because Lester affects the posture of a backwoods preacher. The words travel through him, rather than from him as if transfused through the mother-lode vein of a word mine.
I picked up the book this morning for a long car ride and tore through the book for the third time. Perhaps it took some time to compose proper thoughts on the collection, but there must be a reason I keep returning. This book is itself a return, a home town not yours but nevertheless intimately familiar.
April 7, 2022
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. I love this book from beginning to end. If there's a problem here, it's not with the poet or the poems, but with the design. The text is in an almost agate type that makes the reading difficult. It's kind of like reading poems made from the box scores in the Sports section. Even so, the extra effort pays off. Every poem offers its energy and magic, filling up the book with wonders. As a whole, it's really quite an enjoyable collection. Give it a shot.
December 21, 2018
Beautiful boy!
September 26, 2023
my favorite book of poetry...still...2 years after i first read it
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews