Try free for 30 days
-
Useful Junk
- American Poets Continuum Series
- Narrated by: Erika Meitner
- Length: 2 hrs
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $6.30
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
A Poetry Handbook
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks listeners through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind—a must-have for all poetry-lovers.
-
Stones
- Poems
- By: Kevin Young
- Narrated by: Kevin Young
- Length: 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them - of us - poetry can save.
-
Finna
- Poems
- By: Nate Marshall
- Narrated by: Nate Marshall
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic and it shouldn’t be.
-
-
Brilliant
- By Anonymous User on 04-10-2021
-
Gender Queer
- A Memoir
- By: Maia Kobabe
- Narrated by: Maia Kobabe, Trini Alvarado, Stephen Graybill, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
-
Cry Back My Sea
- 48 Poems in 6 Waves
- By: Sarah Arvio
- Narrated by: Sarah Arvio
- Length: 1 hr and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A breathtaking collection of love poems from one of our great contemporary poets - stunning odes of obsession, loss, and the desire for a renewed self.
-
Frank
- Sonnets
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare.
-
A Poetry Handbook
- By: Mary Oliver
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks listeners through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind—a must-have for all poetry-lovers.
-
Stones
- Poems
- By: Kevin Young
- Narrated by: Kevin Young
- Length: 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them - of us - poetry can save.
-
Finna
- Poems
- By: Nate Marshall
- Narrated by: Nate Marshall
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic and it shouldn’t be.
-
-
Brilliant
- By Anonymous User on 04-10-2021
-
Gender Queer
- A Memoir
- By: Maia Kobabe
- Narrated by: Maia Kobabe, Trini Alvarado, Stephen Graybill, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
-
Cry Back My Sea
- 48 Poems in 6 Waves
- By: Sarah Arvio
- Narrated by: Sarah Arvio
- Length: 1 hr and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A breathtaking collection of love poems from one of our great contemporary poets - stunning odes of obsession, loss, and the desire for a renewed self.
Publisher's Summary
- Erika Meitner's previous collection, Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018), won the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the Library of Virginia Award in Poetry.
- Strong regional appeal in Appalachia, New York, and Miami. Meitner has connections to Jewish community centers, universities, and bookstores throughout the Eastern United States, with particularly strong connections in New York City, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Detroit.
- Several documentary poems in Useful Junk were commissioned by the City of Miami for a series on built environments and sea-level rise. A 28-page spread of these poems with accompanying photographs by Anna Maria Barry-Jester are featured in the Summer 2021 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.
- In the words of the author: “When I started Useful Junk, it felt like a really intimate project I was writing for myself, as a middle-aged woman trying to remember that I had a body—that the world is not OK, but we are beautiful if we can see our own light and remember our own porousness.”
- Useful Junk includes a series of poem-letters that began as a digital correspondence between the author (a Gen-X English professor in rural Virginia with two kids) and a young writer (a Millennial former tech industry worker in New York coming to terms with her queer identity after a recent miscarriage). These poems explore the unique dynamic of online cross-generational friendships and the life lessons both women learned from each other.
- Meitner’s work is confessional, autobiographical, political, narrative, sincere, and accessible. Her work is deeply engaged with the present zeitgeist and offers a window into contemporary US culture via an immensely personal look at an individual’s life. This collection engages with the themes of experiencing desire in a middle-aged female body, inhabiting physical and virtual spaces, cross-generational friendships, selfies and surveillance technology, and how machines and our relationship with machines frame and shape our lives during a period of increasing global and national crises.
Critic Reviews
“Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk is composed of poems that are tragicomic-erotic-nostalgic with a twist of existential dread and a cherry of wit on top. Meitner’s speaker is most comfortable, or most able to endure her discomfort, when she’s on the move, in airport terminals and on subway platforms, between the domestic present tense and the erotic subterfuge of memory, sex, and poetry, between selfhood and the selfie. These daring poems exist at the intersection of usefulness and junk, where I, you, and we are tenuously twined ‘together like an interrobang’ until we drop anchor or disappear.”—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets
“There are so many layers of revelation embodied in Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk, and so many selves allowed to speak and shine here. This book is more than I thought a book could be. Sharp and funny and horny and transcendent and generous and human as hell, it is the very book of poems all my selves have been waiting for. ‘Listen,’ the poet says here, ‘we are making art because we want to inhabit everything / and not fear it.’ Done and done, Erika Meitner. Done and done.”—Carrie Fountain, author of The Life
“Useful Junk is indisputably addictive, graced by the poet’s signature clutch on quirky, her dazzling and exhaustive range, and a dexterity with lyric that consistently upends the ordinary. An Erika Meitner poem is not only enviable art—it’s a loosening of what ties us to the ordinary. And the long-anticipated arrival of this new work is cause for unbridled celebration, a necessary reminder that great poetry always arrives just when we need it.”—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art: Poems