Copia

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 pried open the pages of
Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-
• ak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.
Vines knock and enter through shattered drop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort cracks the street's asphalt to unsolvable puzzles.

Erika Meitner was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review , Ploughshares , Tin House , The Best American Poetry 2011 , Kenyon Review , and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.