This Shouldn't Be Beautiful but It Was & It Was All I Had So I Drew It ─ Poems

“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

Keegan Lester is an American poet splitting time between New York City and Morgantown, West Virginia. His work is published in or forthcoming from Boston Review, The Atlas Review, Powder Keg, Boaat Journal, The Journal, Phantom Books, CutBank, Reality Beach and Sixth Finch among others and has been featured on NPR, The New School Writing Blog and ColdFront. He is the co-founder and poetry editor for the journal Souvenir Lit. This is his first book.