Erika Meitner

Artist Statement

All of my books are united by my ongoing explorations into the relationship between body and place. My earlier poems address the pleasures and dangers of women’s corporeal experiences, while investigating the interstitial spaces of everyday America. These geographical borderlands are springboards for plumbing ideas of home, exile, and personal and collective memory. As a poet who also works in documentary modes, I’ve undertaken projects in collaboration with photographers to investigate social and political systems as they play out in particular (often urban) environments. My newer work addresses issues of environmental justice, gender, embodiment, and technology. I’ve been trying to find a language and framework for larger questions about survival and comfort, abundance and scarcity, justice and grace. How do we survive danger? What are our relationships to systems of power? What do we mine from the earth and each other, and what do we destroy in the process—or leave in our wake?

cover of book - Useful Junk

Bio

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her newest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in 2022. Her poems have appeared most recently in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Poetry, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, Blue Mountain Center, T.S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bethany Arts Community, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and the Mandel Institute. Meitner is currently an professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

erikameitner.com