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Useful Junk
- American Poets Continuum Series
- Narrated by: Erika Meitner
- Length: 2 hrs
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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.
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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
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Story
One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.
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Amazing poetry, but the music
- By Keaira on 07-29-19
By: Olivia Gatwood
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Whirligig
- By: Paul Fleischman
- Narrated by: Robert Field, Lily Christian, Alex Hauk, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Newbery Medal winner Paul Fleischman writes a profoundly moving story of connectedness and the journey of a young soul to self-discovery. Told through the voices of five characters and narrated by age-appropriate actors, Whirligig compels the listener with its lesson on how our actions can impact the lives of others - even years later. A stunningly authentic listening experience.
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Fabulous
- By Tim on 03-21-17
By: Paul Fleischman
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Insomniac City
- New York, Oliver, and Me
- By: Bill Hayes
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at 48 years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
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Touching and Intimate Portrait
- By Amazon Customer on 01-18-19
By: Bill Hayes
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Spy of the First Person
- By: Sam Shepard
- Narrated by: Michael Shannon
- Length: 1 hr and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard's extraordinary narrative tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt ears, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator's memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment - for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust.
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Good Insight
- By Natalie J. Belle MD on 12-28-17
By: Sam Shepard