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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
The seventh collection by award-winning poet Erika Meitner, Assembled Audience explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world.
“What does it mean to gather together?” asks this fervent, frank collection. In these poems, people come together—over meals, at the beach, in protest and prayer and celebration, through vital acts of witness and collective mourning. Amid instability and peril, embodied gathering is not only a survival mechanism, but a form of resistance.
Provocative and engaging, our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, at once a Cassandra and a Pied Piper who brings us into the urgencies of the present moment: climate change, the pandemic and its aftermath, gun violence, xenophobia, fracking, eroding reproductive rights, and the moralized pressure to “stay present” amid disorder and danger. Over and over, we return to the hard work of existing in the Anthropocene—despite all of our knowledge, everything is perilous, and safety is an illusion.
Brutally honest and lyrically dexterous, fusing Whitman’s generous expansiveness with Erika Meitner’s signature virtuosic electricity and wit, Assembled Audience reminds us that forced optimism and bland platitudes won’t save us—but luck and wonder might.
"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
“Meitner is one of the most honest and memorable poets of her generation. Her poems dare to hold everything at once—they are expansive without losing their delicacy; they stretch wide without losing their nerve. They move in images because image is an international language. You open the book and it’s all voltage—urgent, tender, life-surging, messy, stubbornly alive. You leave the final page carrying something quieter but sharper: a thinking that hums, a Dickinsonian listening that lingers, a pattern of attention like an ‘echo, chorus, lamentation, hymn.’ It is craft at its most exacting: the knowledge that meaning is always fragile, and that the lyric is the form equipped to hold that fragility, that need for truth.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
“Assembled Audience is the work of an artist at the top of her game. Whether she is writing as a mother, an observer of wildlife, a documentarian of human disaster, or an active audience for the art of others, Meitner crafts lines of unmistakable power: ‘I refuse to be intimidated by time.’ To encounter such utterances—and such a poet!—is a joy and inspiration.”—Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book