My Coolest Shirt

About W.T. Pfefferie

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 That Matters, a college writing textbook. He works as a college professor, including as the past Director of Expository Writing at 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 the MFA program at American University. His poetry has been published in Nimrod, North American Review, Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals.

Praise for My Coolest Shirt

Nothing could be as cool as W.T. Pfefferle’s new collection, My Coolest Shirt. For this heartbreaking poet and songwriter, love is often understood as a classic American road trip doomed to go awry—the map torn into pieces, all the places we told each other were just up ahead dissolving into desert mirages or derelict motels. These poems echo like the refrains of songs we can almost remember, melodies now somehow lost in our past, doomed always to stay just out of reach.
—David St. John

My Coolest Shirt is a conflation of privacies—one minute a sad country song, the next a hard postmodern stab, then a lovely, embracing memory of romance. The poet weaves exquisite vignettes of seduction and loss so we may attend them individually or sequentially, like afternoon shadows observed from a passing car. Pfefferle is at home with melancholy as well as bliss. The poems are utterly modern, uncommonly clear, affectionate to a fault, and profoundly compassionate. The book just stuns.
—Frederick Barthelme

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. Take out the atlas, study the map, these poems advise, but be prepared for detours, open fields, deserts, motor inns in border towns, and the chance to drive your Pontiac down Superstition Highway. “Let me see what I can salvage / from past scattered moments,” the speaker in the first poem says, and over and over again this book surprises and delights us with what can be saved as we make our journey.
—Nicole Cooley

If love like a ballad repeats to you how to go wrong beautifully one more time, this book should be yours. If a big branch has showered you with leaves and twigs like rough magic, this book should be yours. I could call My Coolest Shirt a novel in verse, but it is something deeper—a story pared to its core, spots of time made of words that burden the heart and lift it with their hard-earned luck.
—Angela Ball

“Lucky for me, I believe in redemption,” the speaker of these poems says in a line characteristically understated, complex, and hilarious. In poems of extraordinary tonal range, W.T. Pfefferle compresses large stories into tight, sharp-edged lyric spaces. In this compression, we find how our tragedies can unfold in increments, tragically small. And yet, in this dwelling on loss, a kind of dwelling-place is made—memory a place to return to, a sustenance, even a redemption.
—William Wenthe