Ideal Cities Book

Erika Meitner's narrative poems are edgy and in-your-face sassy. Strong word choices predominate. Their rhythm resonates long after I've closed the book, calling me back to re-read. Don't be misled by seemingly ordinary topics as her writing is anything but ordinary. She writes to document, to honor, to remember. She often tempers the darker subjects with a dash of humor.

Many of these poems are long, and yet while reading, they don't feel as though they should have ended on the page before. Meitner captures the feeling of geography and uses the various places she's lived or visited as back drops. She writes about relationships, pregnancy, being a new mother. In "The Upstairs Notebook" she writes about how she was going to take her infant son to see the elephants at the circus but it was just too much work to gather up all the supplies needed to go out with a new baby

The title poem, Ideal Cities, has effervescent lines such as:

"Ideal cities are cities where the neighbors
play soul music all night long & don't care"

and

"…….In ideal cities your neighbor sells pot to the cops

for a living,though you've never seen him do it & most days
he wears a caftan to glue rhinestones on the cement frogs"

Even her titles sing: The Violent Legacy of Household Monogamy, Preventing Teen Cough Medicine Abuse.

Her prose poem, "The Chimneys in New Jersey", is exquisite.