Useful Junk

(Paperback)

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Description

Erika Meitner's previous collection, Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018), won the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the Library of Virginia Award in Poetry.

Strong regional appeal in Appalachia, New York, and Miami. Meitner has connections to Jewish community centers, universities, and bookstores throughout the Eastern United States, with particularly strong connections in New York City, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Detroit.

Several documentary poems in Useful Junk were commissioned by the City of Miami for a series on built environments and sea-level rise. A 28-page spread of these poems with accompanying photographs by Anna Maria Barry-Jester are featured in the Summer 2021 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.

In the words of the author: When I started Useful Junk, it felt like a really intimate project I was writing for myself, as a middle-aged woman trying to remember that I had a bodythat the world is not OK, but we are beautiful if we can see our own light and remember our own porousness.

Useful Junk

includes a series of poem-letters that began as a digital correspondence between the author (a Gen-X English professor in rural Virginia with two kids) and a young writer (a Millennial former tech industry worker in New York coming to terms with her queer identity after a recent miscairrage). These poems explore the unique dynamic of online cross-generational friendships and the life lessons both women learned from each other.

Meitners work is confessional, autobiographical, political, narrative, sincere, and accessible. Her work is deeply engaged with the present zeitgeist and offers a window into contemporary US culture via an immensely personal look at an individuals life. This collection engages with the themes of experiencing desire in a middle-aged female body, inhabiting physical and virtual spaces, cross-generational friendships, selfies and surveillance technology, and how machines and our relationship with machines frame and shape our lives during a period of increasing global and national crises.

Reviews

Erika Meitners Useful Junk is composed of poems that are tragicomic-erotic-nostalgic with a twist of existential dread and a cherry of wit on top. Meitners speaker is most comfortable, or most able to endure her discomfort, when shes on the move, in airport terminals and on subway platforms, between the domestic present tense and the erotic subterfuge of memory, sex, and poetry, between selfhood and the selfie. These daring poems exist at the intersection of usefulness and junk, where I, you, and we are tenuously twined together like an interrobang until we drop anchor or disappear.
Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

There are so many layers of revelation embodied in Erika Meitners Useful Junk, and so many selves allowed to speak and shine here. This book is more than I thought a book could be. Sharp and funny and horny and transcendent and generous and human as hell, it is the very book of poems all my selves have been waiting for. Listen, the poet says here, we are making art because we want to inhabit everything / and not fear it. Done and done, Erika Meitner. Done and done.
Carrie Fountain, author of The Life

Useful Junk is indisputably addictive, graced by the poets signature clutch on quirky, her dazzling and exhaustive range, and a dexterity with lyric that consistently upends the ordinary. An Erika Meitner poem is not only enviable artits a loosening of what ties us to the ordinary. And the long-anticipated arrival of this new work is cause for unbridled celebration, a necessary reminder that great poetry always arrives just when we need it.
Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art: Poems

Author Bio

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk (BOA, 2022); Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia (BOA, 2014); and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner. Meitners poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Believer. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Bethany Arts Community, and Blue Mountain Center. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queens University Belfast. Meitner lives in rural southwest Virginia and is currently a Professor of English at Virginia Tech.