Erika Meitner

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B.A. Van Sise

A close-up of Erika Meitner.

Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner’s seventh book of poetry, Assembled Audience, focuses on people who gather — to celebrate and mourn, to protest and witness, to eat and play. The three dozen pieces here (many of which first appeared in a different form or with different titles in journals and anthologies) explore how the bold act of congregating is not only a survival mechanism but also a form of resistance. Meitner is professor of English at UW-Madison, where she oversees the Creative Writing Program, and her poetry has won multiple awards. This event is part of the ongoing Wisconsin Book Festival programming.

media release: “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.