David Lee was raised in West Texas, a background he has never completely escaped, despite his varied experiences as a seminary student, a boxer and semi-pro baseball player (the only white player to ever play for the Negro League Post Texas Blue Stars) known for his knuckleball, a hog farmer, and a decorated Army veteran. Along the way he earned a Ph.D., taught at various universities, and recently retired as the Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at Southern Utah University. Lee was named Utah’s first Poet Laureate in 1997, and has received both the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award in Poetry and the Western States Book Award in Poetry.
This one’s a lucky pick: Rural Texas back when—memory filtered
through the eloquent country vernacular and irreverent, bawdy
imagination of David Lee, who can stretch the truth until delight
shines straight through, unspool a nonstop sentence like a bad cat
with a ball of yarn, see through the eyes of a woman just the same
as a man, and hilariously take down hypocrisy and pretention,
especially 'preaching, zeal maintenance and overlording.' (Full
disclosure: love the guy, but then, read on and I bet you will
too.)" — Eleanor Wilner, MacArthur Fellow, author, The Girl with
Bees in Her Hair and Tourist in Hell
"Combine the sensibilities of a religious fundamentalist with a
free-thinker and what you’ll likely get is an oxymoron, but burnish
that with a poet and you get Lee, a writer who has been publishing
memorable volumes since his 1974 classic, The Porcine Legacy .
. . . Much of the pleasure in reading Lee’s poetry comes from his
scrupulous attention to crafting each page for the ear and
saturating his characters in broad washes of rural dialect, which
he electrifies with humorous pronunciations and innuendo." — David
Feela, Durango Telegraph
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