readings, reviews, runaway truck ramps

Fall’s nearly here, VT is in session again, and the first reviews of Copia are starting to roll in.  I got a star (a star!) from Publishers Weekly, which says “Meitner…delivers a collection that bursts with American abundance…With rich language and an eye for the texture of common objects….Meitner has a stake in personal exploration that brings intimacy and despair to these poems….”  Also super-exciting: Copia is the September Rumpus Poetry Book Club pick.  I’m excited to live-chat with the book club at the end of September!

If you’re interested in hearing me read live, check out my Events page for exact dates and locales.  I’ll be reading in Blacksburg (VA), Tampa (FL), Charlottesville (VA), Geneseo (NY), Brooklyn & Manhattan (NYC), and then me and the family are taking off to the UK in January, where I’ll be teaching at Queen’s University Belfast (see the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry) through the end of June on a Fulbright.  Look for some UK/European reading dates coming soon.

I had a new-ish poem up recently on VerseDaily (“Swift Trucks” originally published in Pleiades, featuring motels & runaway truck ramps), and even cooler, I have a couple of new poems in the most recent issue (#28) of Forklift, OH (along with poems by two of my former grad students–I swear there’s nothing better than being published alongside former students).  Well, there’s one thing that’s maybe better: being included in The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume, due out any minute from the Rose O’Neill Literary House.

I’m excited that we’re hosting some amazing writers here at VT this fall: Adam Gopnik, and Percival Everett, C.K. Williams, and Rachel Zucker as part of our Visiting Writers Series.  I’m reading some incredible books, too, with my graduate poetry workshop–in case you’re interested in reading along: Wet Land (Lucas De Lima), The Pedestrians (Rachel Zucker), Failure and I Bury the Body (Sasha West), Tar (C.K. Williams), Hum (Jamaal May), Thieves in the Afterlife (Kendra DeColo), and Citizen (Claudia Rankine).