Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities, which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner and Copia. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing. Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions Ltd.) is her latest book. These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia―its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger―as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.
