Assembled Audience

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, T. S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, Bethany Arts Community, the Mandel Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.

"I’m always excited for a new book of poems by Erika Meitner, because I know that inside I’ll find questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself, ideas I’m grateful to have articulated, and images I won’t be able to shake from my brain. Assembled Audience has all of that and more. These poems are deeply generous to the reader, serious and playful, alchemizing and liberating."—Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Goldenrod"Assembled Audience is a tour d'force to treasure. With sharp attention and bright wit, Erika Meitner's poems gather the good, the bad, and the ugly of our present day and refine what's assembled into pure and splendid glory. I love this book."—Camille T. Dungy, author of America, A Love Story“Meitner is one of the most honest and memorable poets of her generation. Her poems dare to hold everything at once—they are expansive without losing their delicacy; they stretch wide without losing their nerve. They move in images because image is an international language. You open the book and it’s all voltage—urgent, tender, life-surging, messy, stubbornly alive. You leave the final page carrying something quieter but sharper: a thinking that hums, a Dickinsonian listening that lingers, a pattern of attention like an ‘echo, chorus, lamentation, hymn.’ It is craft at its most exacting: the knowledge that meaning is always fragile, and that the lyric is the form equipped to hold that fragility, that need for truth.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic“Assembled Audience is the work of an artist at the top of her game. Whether she is writing as a mother, an observer of wildlife, a documentarian of human disaster, or an active audience for the art of others,  Meitner crafts lines of unmistakable power: ‘I refuse to be intimidated by time.’ To encounter such utterances—and such a poet!—is a joy and inspiration.”—Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book