Assembled Audience: Poems - Paperback

by Erika Meitner (Author)

These poems are deeply generous to the reader, serious and playful, alchemizing and liberating."--Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Goldenrod

The seventh collection by award-winning poet Erika Meitner, Assembled Audience explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world.

"What does it mean to gather together?" asks this fervent, frank collection. In these poems, people come together--over meals, at the beach, in protest and prayer and celebration, through vital acts of witness and collective mourning. Amid instability and peril, embodied gathering is not only a survival mechanism, but a form of resistance.

Provocative and engaging, our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, at once a Cassandra and a Pied Piper who brings us into the urgencies of the present moment: climate change, the pandemic and its aftermath, gun violence, xenophobia, fracking, eroding reproductive rights, and the moralized pressure to "stay present" amid disorder and danger. Over and over, we return to the hard work of existing in the Anthropocene--despite all of our knowledge, everything is perilous, and safety is an illusion.

Brutally honest and lyrically dexterous, fusing Whitman's generous expansiveness with Erika Meitner's signature virtuosic electricity and wit, Assembled Audience reminds us that forced optimism and bland platitudes won't save us--but luck and wonder might.

Author Biography

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner's poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, T. S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, Bethany Arts Community, the Mandel Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.