3Fiction. African & African American Studies. POTTED MEAT, a novel set in a decaying town in southern West Virginia, follows a young boy into adolescence as he struggles with abusive parents, poverty, alcohol addiction, and racial tensions. Using fragments as a narrative mode to highlight the terror of ellipses, POTTED MEAT explores the fear, power, and vulnerability of storytelling, and in doing so, investigates the peculiar tensions of the body: How we seek to escape or remain embodied during repeated trauma.

Steven Dunn's POTTED MEAT is full of wonder and silence and beauty and strangeness and ugliness and sadness and truth and hope. I am so happy it is in the world. This book needs to be read.--Laird Hunt

POTTED MEAT is an extraordinary book. Here is an emerging voice that calls us to attention. I have no doubt that Steven Dunn's writing is here, like a visceral intervention across the surface of language, simultaneously cutting to its depths, to change the world. My first attempt at offering words in this context was to write: thank you. And that is how I feel about Steven Dunn's writing; I feel grateful: to be alive during the time in which he writes books.--Selah Saterstrom