Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022) and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which was the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Poetry
July/Aug 2022
Gnostic Spring, or That New York Times Article on Languishing
We have all stroked the face of God or someone else lightly with our fingertips, but making the mystery of the unseen manifest didn’t help us with the ever-growing vault […]
Poetry
Spring 2006
Smile! It’s School Picture Time
The greasy photographer with his comb-over,with his free plastic comb which breaks immediatelyin my kinked hair, tilts my chin off-kilter.One hand grasps my shoulder, twists me closertowards the camera; his […]
Poetry
Spring 2006
Absence
grows the heartopen: balloon surgery inflated arterydistended implant stunning single breastcondom gone awry & batted around health classelastic vase bypass cloud seed, puffedmilkweed pod (your shivering lung- fuls, exhausted lips).This magician […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2015
Post-Game-Day Blessing
Bless the black G-string, abandoned on the sidewalk beside a green gingko sapling on Lee Street. Bless the girl who shimmied out of it before dawn, drunk on Curaçao or […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2015
On the Road
We are trying to get pregnant so everything makes me weep: the amorphous metal sculpture shaped like a tree on fire outside the regional airport. A young woman with prosthetic […]