Poetry. Winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. "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 distinctly snappy voice, a blend of assertiveness and vulnerability"—Stephen Corey. "These are poems like the tattoos she hymns and ponders—they mark our being with their delicate, indelible patterns"—Greg Orr.
Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears. Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics. With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.
The poems in this anthology document the political and personal events of the president's crucial first days through a variety of contemporary poetic voices.
"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.
This volume examines a diverse set of spaces and buildings seen through the lens of popular practice and belief to shed light on the complexities of sacred space in America. Contributors explore how dedication sermons document shifting understandings of the meetinghouse in early 19th-century Connecticut; the changes in evangelical church architecture during the same century and what that tells us about evangelical religious life; the impact of contemporary issues on Catholic church architecture; the impact of globalization on the construction of traditional sacred spaces; the urban practice of Jewish space; nature worship and Central Park in New York; the mezuzah and domestic sacred space; and, finally, the spiritual aspects of African American yard art.
The Way We Work reveals that a seismic change has occurred in the workplace since the appearance in 1974 of Studs Terkel's Working. Terkel's subjects, despite their alienation, had a sense of themselves as workers and felt that in the workplace they were part of a community.The people Terkel interviewed were highly class conscious in a way that today seems radical and even anachronistic. By contrast, while some of the narrators in The Way We Work feel passionate about their work, others are barely conscious that they are "workers." In transit from one job to another, some workers find it hard to take either their co-workers or their job situation too much to heart. One pronoun rarely used by the narrators of the works in this anthology is "we." Each of the 43 pieces in The Way We Work represents a voice that is idiosyncratic, ironic, or humorous. Alongside such acclaimed writers as Tom Wolfe, Rick Bass, Barbara Garson, Ha Jin, Charles Bowden, Erica Funkhouser, Allan Gurganus, Catherine Anderson, Philip Levine, Edward Conlon, and Mona Simpson, appear the narratives of little-known writers. No other collection of writings about contemporary work in this country showcases the personal accounts of employees from a creative, literary perspective. These writings address such current issues as the effects of globalization, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and the weakening of unions, as well as a general sense of worker disengagement in the workplace. Speaking in multiple genres, the men and women whose voices are collected here run the whole gamut of the workplace. From an executive at an office products company to a migrant fruit picker to a stripper to a doctor to a cleaner of garbage trucks, The Way We Work captures, with passion and honesty, the experiences of a myriad of workers.
Writing Poetry combines an accessible introduction to the essential elements of the craft, with a critical awareness of its underpinnings. The authors argue that separating the making of poems from critical thinking about them is a false divide and encourage students to become accomplished critics and active readers of poetic texts.
Poetry. Second Edition. Poetry. Winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. "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 distinctly snappy voice, a blend of assertiveness and vulnerability"—Stephen Corey. "These are poems like the tattoos she hymns and ponders—they mark our being with their delicate, indelible patterns"—Greg Orr.
