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    Useful Junk
    Useful Junk
    Useful Junk
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    Useful Junk

    By Erika Meitner

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateApr 18, 2022
    ISBN9781950774548
    Author

    Erika Meitner

    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. Meitner’s 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. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner lives in rural southwest Virginia and is currently a Professor of English at Virginia Tech.

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      Book preview

      Useful Junk - Erika Meitner

      Cover: Useful Junk by Erika Meitner

      USEFUL JUNK

      poems by

      ERIKA MEITNER

      AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES, NO. 191

      BOA EDITIONS, LTD. ROCHESTER, NY 2022

      Copyright © 2022 by Erika Meitner

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      First Edition

      22 23 24 25 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

      Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 104 for special individual acknowledgments.

      Cover Design: Sandy Knight

      Front Cover Art: Masculine Still Life (powder coated steel, stoneware, brass), 2021, by Genesis Belanger, photographed by Pauline Shapiro.

      Back Cover Art: Hostess (stoneware, porcelain, fabric), 2019, by Genesis Belanger, photographed by Pauline Shapiro.

      Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

      Manufacturing: McNaughton &Gunn

      BOA Logo: Mirko

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Meitner, Erika, 1975- author.

      Title: Useful junk / poems by Erika Meitner.

      Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2022. | Series: American poets continuum series; no. 191 | Summary: A master of documentary poetry, Erika Meitner takes up the question of desire and intimacy in her latest poetry collection — Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2021044285 (print) | LCCN 2021044286 (ebook) | ISBN 9781950774531 (paperback) | ISBN 9781950774548 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

      Classification: LCC PS3613.E436 U84 2022 (print) | LCC PS3613.E436 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044285

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044286

      BOA Editions, Ltd.

      250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

      Rochester, NY 14607

      www.boaeditions.org

      A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

      Contents

      I would like to be the you in someone’s poem

      Letter in the Time of Junkmail

      Selfie with Airplane Voyeurism & References to Your Body

      The Seeming Impenetrability of the Space Between

      All the Past and Futures

      Seven Fragments About Christmas and an Episode of Night Swimming

      Médium Adam 25

      Eternity Now

      Elegy with Lo-Fi Selfie

      from this thought a hazy question

      Nude Selfie Ode

      Aubade with Projector

      Are You Popular? (1947)

      Beyond Which

      Letter to Hillary on the Radical Hospitality of the Body

      Invitation to Tender

      the bureau of reclamation

      This Volatile Taxonomy

      A Temple of the Spirit

      All the Secrets and Holes

      Now That I Can See the Light

      Swift Trucks

      Ghost Eden

      Missing Parts

      An Occupation of Loss

      A Brief Ontological Investigation

      The Practice of Depicting Matter as It Passes from Radiance to Decomposition

      letter from around the way

      Message from the Interior

      Smith Street, 1998

      What Follows Is a Reconstruction Based on the Best Available Evidence

      we used to go to the Bulgarian Bar but not together

      The Replication Machine

      Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide

      The Last Decade of the 20th Century

      Come Correct

      Remember Me as a Time of Day

      the experience we are thrust into

      Letter on Gratitude

      My List of True Facts

      Beyond Which

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Colophon

      Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem …"

      —Walt Whitman

      What defines desiring-machines is precisely their capacity for an unlimited number of connections, in every sense and in all directions.

      —Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

      … the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face.

      —James Baldwin, on painter Beauford Delaney

      I would like to be the you in someone’s poem

      I would like to be the you in someone’s poem so I can say I’m not even kidding they’re playing Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin on the Kroger sound system and that song reminds me of my dead grandmother and the way she’d sing the dy dy dy bits in her Yiddish accent at joyful family events and here I am getting a little misty at the register

      I would like to be the you in someone’s poem so I could also explain that when I got back into my car with groceries the radio was playing Footloose by Kenny Loggins and I immediately thought of Lori Singer and her dangerous red cowboy boots and the way dancing can lead to fucking according to every small-town preacher on film

      But really I would like to be the you in your poem—especially if there’s a car on fire we can rubberneck on a bus trip through an unspecified city or maybe a rooftop bar with cocktails that always have one mysterious ingredient requiring inquiry like Elisir Novasalus or Punt e Mes

      Especially if I’m in a parking lot at night at one supermarket or another again sitting in the driver’s seat of my car typing itinerant messages to you in your poem

      The messages say Wonder and O say can you see

      They say put me in your fictional poem because we are all fictions, because

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