Copia

Erika Meitner's fourth book grapples with the widespread implications of commercialism and over-consumption, particularly in exurban America. Documentary poems originally commissioned by <i>Virginia Quarterly Review</i> examine the now-bankrupt city of Detroit, once the thriving heart of the American Dream. Meitner probes the hulking ruins of office buildings, tract housing, superstores, construction sites, and freeways--exposing a vacuous world of decay and abandonment--while holding out hope for re-birth from ashes.<br><br><i>Because it is an uninhabited place, because it<br>makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of<br>Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories<br>absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-<br>oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.<br>Vines knock and enter through shattered<br>drop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort<br>cracks the street's asphalt to unsolvable<br>puzzles.</i><br><br><b>Erika Meitner</b> was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in <i>American Poetry Review</i>, <i>Ploughshares</i>, <i>Tin House</i>, <i>The Best American Poetry 2011</i>, <i>Kenyon Review</i>, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.<br>