Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls
“These cool, hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl, coming of age and being of age, are full of startling detail and vivid setting. Meitner’s range, wit, compassion and her alertness to the moments where domestic and collective experience intersect, make these poems memorable. This book is a seriously good read.”
—Daisy Fried, author of Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice
“Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a sexy, funny, smart book full of crack-the-whip language. Meitner climbs the scaffolding of different kinds of rhetoric— the abduction narrative, the extraterrestrial encounter, the customs declaration form, the marriage vow—to provide startling insight into questions of truth and its constructions. For its music, for its stylistic variety, for its ambition, and for its delights, this instruction manual proves its worth again and again.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables
“Whether working from memories of girlhood or accounts of alien abduction, these poems trace the seam of the fantastic and the quotidian, carefully mapping the way each slides into the other. Meitner’s poems are at once smooth and explosive, combustible engines of propulsive force. Vigilance meets the makeshift when precise attention leads to new assessment, the transformation of the self indivisible from self knowledge.”
—Jason Schneiderman, author of Striking Surface