The Perfect Life: Lyric Essays

Literary Nonfiction. 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.

"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