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.
Ideal Cities: Poems (National Poetry Series)
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“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 )
The poems in Erika Meitner’s Ideal Cities are road maps, blueprints, dollhouses, dioramas.....Meitner’s poetry isn’t afraid of history and personal histories. Her voice is smart, sassy, and savvy. Her ideal poems are built with mortar and quirkily astounding metaphors (Denise Duhamel )
The poems in Erika Meitner’s Ideal Cities are road maps, blueprints, dollhouses, dioramas.....Meitner’s poetry isn’t afraid of history and personal histories. Her voice is smart, sassy, and savvy. Her ideal poems are built with mortar and quirkily astounding metaphors (Denise Duhamel )
About the Author
Erika Meitner's poems have appeared in The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Tin House. She is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech and the author of Inventory at the All-night Drugstore.
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Erika Meitner's first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and was published by Anhinga Press in 2003. Her second book, Ideal Cities, was selected as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series, and was published by Harper Perennial in August 2010. Her third collection of poems, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, was published in February 2011 by Anhinga Press. Her poems have appeared recently in Tin House, The Southern Review, Indiana Review, APR, Slate, VQR, and The New Republic. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program. For poems and additional information, please visit www.erikameitner.com
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ideal narrative poetry,
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This review is from: Ideal Cities: Poems (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Erika Meitner's narrative poems are edgy and in-your-face sassy. Strong word choices predominate. Their rhythm resonates long after I've closed the book, calling me back to re-read. Don't be misled by seemingly ordinary topics as her writing is anything but ordinary. She writes to document, to honor, to remember. She often tempers the darker subjects with a dash of humor.
Many of these poems are long, and yet while reading, they don't feel as though they should have ended on the page before. Meitner captures the feeling of geography and uses the various places she's lived or visited as back drops. She writes about relationships, pregnancy, being a new mother. In "The Upstairs Notebook" she writes about how she was going to take her infant son to see the elephants at the circus but it was just too much work to gather up all the supplies needed to go out with a new baby The title poem, Ideal Cities, has effervescent lines such as: "Ideal cities are cities where the neighbors play soul music all night long & don't care" and ".......In ideal cities your neighbor sells pot to the cops for a living,though you've never seen him do it & most days he wears a caftan to glue rhinestones on the cement frogs" Even her titles sing: The Violent Legacy of Household Monogamy, Preventing Teen Cough Medicine Abuse. Her prose poem, "The Chimneys in New Jersey", is exquisite.
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