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Inventory
at the All-Night Drugstore
Anhinga
Press, 2003
Ask your public or university
library,
or your local
independent
bookseller
to order Inventory at
the All-Night
Drugstore
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Erika
Meitner's is a vertiginous art—full of flash and dazzle, fire and speed, the
offbeat and the upbeat, the buoyant bob and weave. She's a poet of perpetual
motion, cataloguing pockets of turbulence, gospels of lust, the hours before
happy—and after. Erotic, comic, quirky with wordplay and double entendre,
her poems embrace the everyday, teasing the miraculous from the mundane. By
turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Meitner casts a wry, empathic eye on the
sanctities and subterfuges that keep us human. She is a true original, her
affectionate attention resonating in poems that “make the world sing on
cue.”
-
Ron Wallace
In
Erika Meitner's
Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, we enter worlds marvelously realized,
our intrepid narrator an unerring guide. Whether we navigate the
initiatory mysteries and indignities of adolescent urgencies, the perils and
pleasures of the adult sexual quest, or the vital chaos of teaching in a
Brooklyn public school, we are in the care of a poet who cares: feisty,
funny, and ever alert to the telling details of a life lived in the rush and
anguish of the post-modern world. These are poems like the tattoos she
hymns and ponders—they mark our being with their delicate, indelible patterns,
their swoops and utterances and wild surmises.
-
Greg Orr
The
reader takes an unpredictable, exhilarating trip with the
subject matter of Erika Meitner's poems—from memories of a
hormone-charged adolescence in the big city, to adult affairs of
love and lust and loss; from learning to teach in a classroom
filled with pubescent fireplug mirrors of oneself, to
confronting one's Jewish history at the hands of an equally
fiery grandmother. But riding heard on all this range is
Meitner's distinctly snappy voice, a blend of assertiveness and
vulnerability...
-
Stephen Corey,
Judge
of the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry
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