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.

Winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle 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.

"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 it
makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of
Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories
absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-
oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.
Vines knock and enter through shattered
drop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort
cracks the street's asphalt to unsolvable
puzzles."

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 means
wrong sizes on Wal-Mart racks, variety bags of
pumpkins extinguishing themselves on the stoop"

"children from the trailer park trawling our identical lawns soon
so 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.

"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.