Assembled Audience

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, T. S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, Bethany Arts Community, the Mandel Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.

"I’m always excited for a new book of poems by Erika Meitner, because I know that inside I’ll find questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself, ideas I’m grateful to have articulated, and images I won’t be able to shake from my brain. Assembled Audience has all of that and more. These poems are deeply generous to the reader, serious and playful, alchemizing and liberating."—Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Goldenrod"Assembled Audience is a tour d'force to treasure. With sharp attention and bright wit, Erika Meitner's poems gather the good, the bad, and the ugly of our present day and refine what's assembled into pure and splendid glory. I love this book."—Camille T. Dungy, author of America, A Love Story