"These poems are so generous, so bright and sharp, so funny and winning, they feel immense."
--Paul Guest

"Erika Meitner is the new voice of intelligent and emotional poems. Good for poetry. Good for poetry lovers. Good for the rest of us, too."
-- Nikki Giovanni

Exploring themes of pregnancy, motherhood, ancestry, and life in the borderline slums of Washington, DC, the richly felt and adroit poetry of Erika Meitner's Ideal Cities moves, mesmerizes, and delights. The work of an important emerging voice in contemporary American poetry--a winner of the 2009...

Erika Meitner's fourth book grapples with the widespread implications of commercialism and over-consumption, particularly in exurban America. Documentary poems originally commissioned by Virginia Quarterly Review examine the now-bankrupt city of Detroit, once the thriving heart of the American Dream. Meitner probes the hulking ruins of office buildings, tract housing, superstores, construction sites, and freeways--exposing a vacuous world of decay and abandonment--while holding out hope for re-birth from ashes.

Because it is an uninhabited place, because it
makes me hollow, I...