Useful Junk
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
