Author Night with Erika Meitner
Venue: Blacksburg Books, Blacksburg
Organizations: Erika Meitner
Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Time: 7:00 - 8:30 PM
Event Types: Speaking Engagements
Cost: Free
Description:
Blacksburg Books presents an Author Night with Erika Meitner on Tuesday, April 5, 2022.

Join us at the book launch for poet and Blacksburg resident Erika Meitner’s sixth book of poetry, "Useful Junk". Meitner will read from her critically-acclaimed work and answer questions from the audience.

Meitner’s sixth collection, "Useful Junk", explores memory, desire, and the various ways the body sees and is seen. Part travelogue, part dream journal, part epistle, these poems arrive right on time with their wisdom, wit, and wonder. With dauntless vulnerability, Meitner travels a world of strip malls, supermarkets, airplanes, 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. These poems affirm that we are made of every intimate moment we have ever had, and plumb the ways in which digital technologies—sexting, Uber, selfies, Instagram—are reframing self-image and shifting the ratios of risk and reward in erotic encounters. 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.

Erika Meitner is a poet and the author of six books of poems. She also directs the Creative Writing programs at Virginia Tech.

She was born and raised in Queens and Long Island, New York. She attended Dartmouth College (for a BA in Creative Writing and Literature), Hebrew University on a Reynolds Scholarship, and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and her MA in Religious Studies as a Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies.

Her poems have appeared in Tin House, The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares and elsewhere.

Links:

• http://erikameitner.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/ErikaMeitner
• https://www.twitter.com/rikam99

For more information, visit: https://www.blacksburgbooks.com/events/author-night-with-erika-meitner or https://www.facebook.com/Blacksburg.Books or email info@blacksburgbooks.com or call 540-315-9650.