Erika Meitner

An unflinching, open-hearted inquiry that encompasses religion, disaster, resilience, infertility, adoption, parenthood, and what it means to love one's neighbor.

Holy Moly Carry Me

Useful Junk

Poetry. "These cool, hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl, coming of age and being of age, are full ofstartling detail and vivid setting. Meitner's range, wit, compassion and her alertness to the moments where domestic and collective experience intersect, make these poems memorable. This book is a seriously good read"—Daisy Fried.

Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls

“These poems are so generous, so bright and sharp, so funny and winning, they feel immense.” —Paul Guest “Erika Meitner is the new voice of intelligent and emotional poems. Good for poetry. Good for poetry lovers. Good for the rest of us, too.” — Nikki Giovanni Exploring themes of pregnancy, motherhood, ancestry, and life in the borderline slums of Washington, DC, the richly felt and adroit poetry of Erika Meitner’s Ideal Cities moves, mesmerizes, and delights. The work of an important emerging voice in contemporary American poetry—a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Paul Guest—Ideal Cities gloriously perpetuates NPS’s long-standing tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets.

Poems

Ideal Cities

A master of documentary poetry, Erika Meitner takes up the question of desire and intimacy in her latest collection of poems. In her previous five collections of poetry, Erika Meitner has established herself as one of America's most incisive observers, cherished for her remarkable ability to temper catastrophe with tenderness. In her newest collection Useful Junk, Meitner considers what it means to be a sexual being in a world that sees women as invisible--as mothers, customers, passengers, worshippers, wives. These poems render our changing bodies as real and alive, shaped by the sense memories of long-lost lovers and the still thrilling touch of a spouse after years of parenthood, affirming that we are made of every intimate moment we have ever had. Letter poems to a younger poet interspersed throughout the collection question desire itself and how new technologies--Uber, sexting, Instagram--are reframing self-image and shifting the ratios of risk and reward in erotic encounters. With dauntless vulnerability, Meitner travels a world of strip malls, supermarkets, and subway platforms, remaining porous and open to the world, always returning to the intimacies rooted deep within the self as a shout against the dying earth. Boldly affirming that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, Useful Junk reminds us that our selves are made real and beautiful by our embodied experiences and that our desire is what keeps us alive.

"Started as a VQR documentary-project, Copia examines the now-bankrupt city of Detroit, once the thriving heart of the American Dream. "--

Erika Meitner

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