Useful Junk

By Erika Meitner

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781950774548

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.

Book preview

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 [e-mail].

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.

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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