The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness

Description

The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness
by Gerry LaFemina

ISBN: 978-1-948692-78-6 paperback 19.95
ISBN: 978-1-948692-79-3 ebook 9.99
8 x 8, 154 PP
February 2022
Personal Essay / creative nonfiction

The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness by Gerry Lafemina is CNF. Like the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, it’s a hodge-podge: memoir, philosophy, lit crit, pop culture, history, and reflection. Gerry calls it a meditation. It really is an essay in the French way of being a trial or an experiment.

Gerry LaFemina’s poetry collections include Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping, The Story of Ash and Little Heretic. His essays on prosody, Palpable Magic, came out in 2015 and Kendall Hunt recently released his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically. He teaches at Frostburg State University and in the Carlow University MFA Program. https://gerrylafemina.com/

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT GERRY LAFEMINA’S
THE PURSUIT: A MEDITATION ON HAPPINESS

Among the many inspired riffs in Gerry LaFemina’s freewheeling meditation on happiness, nothing impressed me more than the hard-won honesty the author brings to bear on his own foibles, wounds, privileges, and passions. Though he never explicitly says so, his book strongly implies that while honesty cannot guarantee happiness, it does make happiness possible. It has done that much and more for LaFemina.

—Garret Keizer, author of The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want

 I have a hard time distilling books that are wise, timely, gracefully written, richly compassionate, and honest and truthful and necessary. And yet, here I go, fumbling around trying to find the right words to entice you into opening these pages, knowing that no map is the territory, no portrait is the person. All I can tell you is Gerry LaFemina’s voice is as warm and direct as soul music, and his observations about our fallen world will give you hope. Go on ahead, open the book. Here comes our morning.

—Reginald McKnight, author of White Boys and He Sleeps