Publishers Weekly
01/17/2022
The vulnerable and energetic sixth book from Meitner (Holy Moly Carry Me) explores the effect of technology, memory, and travel on the self. "Getting a little misty at the register," she writes, revisiting a moment in her New York City past while checking out in an uninspiring CVS of her rural present, "I want to rub up against slick/ subway tile, feel my back pressed to a bathroom stall door// in a bar where the band is playing no one's favorite song/ about yearning, or nostalgia, or sadness with a hand/ down my pants." Navigating a pregnancy scare on the cusp of menopause, she riffs on fertility, adoption, and the Holocaust: "There's an unspoken mandate to procreate/ when all your people your family were actually slaughtered" ("My List of True Facts"). In these poems of yearning, the body's accumulated knowledge moves toward the future: "Some field with an abandoned hotel where// we'll sit on the edge of the cracked/ empty pool with its peeling blue paint and recount// all the ways we forgot to touch each other." This layered work is full of intriguing observations and tender, incisive reflections on human experience. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk is composed of poems that are tragicomic-erotic-nostalgic with a twist of existential dread and a cherry of wit on top. Meitner’s speaker is most comfortable, or most able to endure her discomfort, when she’s 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 Meitner’s 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 poet’s 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 art—it’s 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
