Erika Meitner
Erika Meitner is the author of Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore and Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls from Anhinga Press, and Ideal Cities, which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in journals including The New Republic, Tin House, The Southern Review, The American Poetry Review, and on Slate.com. She is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.
Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (2002)
Erika Meitner's is a vertiginous art — full of flash and dazzle, fire and speed, the offbeat and the upbeat, the buoyant bob and weave. She's a poet of perpetual motion, cataloguing pockets of turbulence, gospels of lust, the hours before happy — and after. Erotic, comic, quirky with wordplay and double entendre, her poems embrace the everyday, teasing the miraculous from the mundane. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Meitner casts a wry, empathic eye on the sanctities and subterfuges that keep us human. She is a true original, her affectionate attention resonating in poems that "make the world sing on cue." -- Ronald Wallace
In Erika Meitner's Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, we enter worlds marvelously realized, our intrepid narrator an unerring guide. Whether we navigate the initiatory mysteries and indignities of adolescent urgencies, the perils and pleasures of the adult sexual quest, or the vital chaos of teaching in a Brooklyn public school, we are in the care of a poet who cares: feisty, funny, and ever alert to the telling details of a life lived in the rush and anguish of the post-modern world. These are poems like the tattoos she hymns and ponders ("Etched meat, I keep thinking/ while Tom works this buzzing needle/ around my leg.") -- they mark our very being with their delicate, indelible patterns, their swoops and utterances and wild surmises. -- Gregory Orr
The reader takes an unpredictable, exhilarating trip with the subject matter of Erika Meitner's poems -- from memories of a hormone-charged adolescence in the big city, to adult affairs of love and lust and loss; from learning to teach in a classroom filled with pubescent fireplug mirrors of oneself, to confronting one's Jewish history at the hands of an equally fiery grandmother. But riding herd on all this range is Meitner's distinctively snappy voice, a blend of assertiveness and vulnerability which at one moment can insist, "Feed me / a sly salacious salad," then at the next can fear "that the female body // must be marked / before it can serve // as a vehicle / for the spirit." When she watches a blind man brashly driving a bumper car at a county fair, her poetry's raison d'etre comes at least momentarily clear:
I wished I could be that fearless—to be plunged
into darkness, strapped in and moving forward,
not knowing what might come barreling
from any direction to clock me into oblivion. -- Contest judge Stephen Corey
INVENTORY AT THE ALL-NIGHT DRUGSTORE BY ERIKA MEITNER $17.00
These cool, hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl, coming of age and being of age, are full of startling 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, author of My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
Whether working from memories of girlhood or accounts of alien abduction, these poems trace the seam of the fantastic and the quotidian, carefully mapping the way each slides into the other. Meitner's poems are at once smooth and explosive, combustible engines of propulsive force. Vigilance meets the makeshift when precise attention leads to new assessment, the transformation of the self indivisible from self knowledge. -- Jason Schneiderman, author of Striking Surface
Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a sexy, funny, smart book full of crack-the-whip language. Meitner climbs the scaffolding of different kinds of rhetoric -- the abduction narrative, the extraterrestrial encounter, the customs declaration form, the marriage vow -- to provide startling insight into questions of truth and its constructions. For its music, for its stylistic variety, for its ambition, and for its delights, this instruction manual proves its worth again and again. -- Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables
MAKESHIFT INSTRUCTIONS FOR VIGILANT GIRLS BY ERIKA MEITNER $17.00
Someone Calls
men to her house
she straddles the roof
they alternate turns
coaxing her down
they wait in the street
which spins on its axis
the wind gets monotonous
with purring fumes
exhausted trails
of hooked alarms
bordello rungs extended
everything is red red red
and waiting
take this light (night-swim)
take this sound (wing-span)
traversing the acrobat sky
she is jet-propulsion
and shy with crowned stature
divines the go relay's
fast-bursting signs
a car starter coughing
the hymned powerlines
bellies of dogwood leaves
wielding their fur she is
armor-ready hyper-aware
poised on the edge
like a zipper's pull
if the moon is a portal
a gate to the real
like panties like heaven
a palace of skin
her fall will unlock it
a finger running
her lover's spine
a key a bolt tearing
one gold tooth one
gold star at a time
from the sky's body
eternal partner in crime
the strings that hold her
all want no pain only
breathless brilliance bring
Instructions for Constructing an Alien Abduction
To convince experts you must whisper theophany and return.
You must not let them know the examination
was incomplete, that no one except
your dermatologist stared into your eyes
for a prolonged period while he levitated
forward off his pleather stool to brush
your broken capillaries with his thumbs.
Let the otherworldly journey sound
like a guided tour of the most ruptured
art museums. Make sure to include
the not-quite-uniformly light sky
and the sea hanging from the last twisted
wisteria vine. (It's a small sea--
the kind they send inconsequential
jewels to bathe in. Never mind
the hard water, the beds of kelp
that deter sharks and anyone who loathes
the texture of human hair.) Tangle yourself
in the aftermath: a sudden and arcane knowledge
of detritus, the fly sleeping quietly under your tongue,
and any message wound in the fortune cookies
of bedsheets that begins: Dear Sirs,
I lie in your fleecy underbelly until winter comes and I can cross the ocean on foot. Along the way, my kinsmen will care for me, as will any lone kayaker scooting his craft towards the sun. A woman traveling alone is a cause for vulnerable celebration. Her hair will declare her for miles.