2022 News

2022 is shaping up to be a weird and liminal pandemic year, but I’m thrilled that my newest book Useful Junk is due out on April 5th from BOA Editions. You can pre-order it here from BOA directly, or from your local bookseller, and if you want a review copy, you can contact Gena Hartman at BOA! It will also be for sale at AWP a few weeks early.

Publishers Weekly published the first review: “The vulnerable and energetic sixth book from Meitner (Holy Moly Carry Me) explores the effect of technology, memory, and travel on the self…In these poems of yearning, the body’s accumulated knowledge moves toward the future. This layered work is full of intriguing observations and tender, incisive reflections on human experience.”

I’ll be doing a bunch of readings all over the place this spring, so if you want to see me as an embodied human in VA, MA, CA, NY, NJ, or MD, check my events page for details! I’m still booking out readings (both virtual and in-person), so stay tuned. I’m thrilled we’re slowly returning to in-person events–I missed reading to audiences in actual spaces with noise and espresso machines and clinking glasses and creaking chairs. If you want me to come read at your series or bookstore, feel free to contact me here, or you can also get in touch with my speaker’s agent, Anya Backlund at Blue Flower Arts.

2021 was a great year for my poems too. I had a poem in The New Yorker (which, as a native New Yorker, was a bucket-list item for sure!), and other poems in The Believer, Orion, Shenandoah, Four Way Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Islandia (a Miami Vice poem!). And my poem “A Brief Eschatological Investigation” won the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Also part of the documentary poetry project that I’ve been working on for the past four years with photographer Anna Maria Barry-Jester–on sea-level rise and the built environment in Miami–was the cover story in the Summer 2021 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. And I have lots of new poems coming out this spring and summer in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, The Southern Review, and Couplet.

Useful Junk has been 5+ years in the making–the title comes from an antique store (now closed) on Route 58 in Northeastern Ohio. I am so grateful to everyone who helped me with this book. I can’t wait for you all to read it! It has everything: desire, bar bathrooms, airplanes, selfies, sex, memory, art, nudity, supermarkets, photography, light, a cameo by Michael Landon, and meditations on the body!