Useful Junk

Audiobook now available!

A master of documentary poetry, Erika Meitner takes up the question of desire and intimacy in her latest collection of poems.

In her newest collection Useful Junk, Meitner explores memory, passion, and the various ways the body sees and is seen. These poems speak to us from parking lots, planes, dreamscapes, and the digital arena to affirm 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 consider how digital technologies—sexting, Uber, selfies, Instagram—are reframing self-image and shifting the ratios of risk and reward in erotic encounters.

With dauntless vulnerability, Meitner taps into the metaphysical, the ekphrastic, the sensual, and the ordinary moments of life, remaining porous and open to the world, and always returning to the desires rooted deep within the self as a way forward in a damaged world. Boldly asserting 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.

Praise for Useful Junk

“Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk is composed of poems that are tragicomic-erotic-nostalgic with a twist of existential dread and a cherry of wit on top. Meitner’s speaker is most comfortable, or most able to endure her discomfort, when she’s on the move, in airport terminals and on subway platforms, between the domestic present tense and the erotic subterfuge of memory, sex, and poetry, between selfhood and the selfie. These daring poems exist at the intersection of usefulness and junk, where I, you, and we are tenuously twined ‘together like an interrobang’ until we drop anchor or disappear.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

“There are so many layers of revelation embodied in Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk, and so many selves allowed to speak and shine here. This book is more than I thought a book could be. Sharp and funny and horny and transcendent and generous and human as hell, it is the very book of poems all my selves have been waiting for. ‘Listen,’ the poet says here, ‘we are making art because we want to inhabit everything / and not fear it.’ Done and done, Erika Meitner. Done and done.” —Carrie Fountain, author of The Life

“Useful Junk is indisputably addictive, graced by the poet’s signature clutch on quirky, her dazzling and exhaustive range, and a dexterity with lyric that consistently upends the ordinary. An Erika Meitner poem is not only enviable art—it’s a loosening of what ties us to the ordinary. And the long-anticipated arrival of this new work is cause for unbridled celebration, a necessary reminder that great poetry always arrives just when we need it." — Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

the bureau of reclamation

we the loyal companions 
we who are hyped about everything 
we who cross the thresholds of accountability 
our songs of praise sound like gunshots 
we the supermarket shoppers 
we the leggings-as-pants wearers 
we the shade throwers 
the riven in nostalgia itinerants 
who avoid our mail at all costs 
who remember all our exes unequivocally 
we the hypervigilant 
we who collect regular explanations of benefits 
we who worry about food security 
we the invasive species 
we who dwell (mostly) in the body 
we who buried our long-suffering ancestors 
what would you like to cup in your hands again? 
water? a flame?