Erika Meitner – författare

“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.

"The poems in Copia are about what is and what is almost-gone, what is in limbo and what won''t give way, what is almost at rock bottom but still and always brimming with the possibility of miracle."—Rachel Zucker

Erika Meitner''s fourth book takes cues from the Land Artists of the 1960s who created work based on landscapes of urban peripheries and structures in various states of disintegration. The collection also includes a section of documentary poems about Detroit that were commissioned for Virginia Quarterly Review.

Because it is an uninhabited place, because itmakes me hollow, I pried open the pages ofDetroit: the houses blanked out, factoriesabsorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.Vines knock and enter through shattereddrop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwortcracks the street''s asphalt to unsolvablepuzzles.

Meitner also probes the hulking ruins of office buildings, tract housing, superstores, construction sites, and freeways, and doesn''t shy from the interactions that occur in Walmart and supermarket parking lots.

It is nearly Halloween, which meanswrong sizes on Wal-Mart racks, variety bags ofpumpkins extinguishing themselves on the stoop

children from the trailer park trawling our identical lawns soonso we can give away nickels, light, sandpaper, raisins, cement.

Erika Meitner was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Best American Poetry 2011, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.

Winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry

Erika Meitner’s fifth collection of poetry plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.