Please join us for a special event co-sponsored by the Magid Writing Center at the University of Iowa with poets Erika Meitner and Caryl Pagel!
Erika Meitner will read from Useful Junk. “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...” —Diane Seuss
Erika Meitner is the author of Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia; and Holy Moly Carry Me (2018 National Jewish Book Award Winner and finalist for Library of VA Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award). Meitner is professor and MFA program director of the English Department at UW-Madison.
Caryl Pagel will read from Free Clean Fill Dirt. “Caryl Pagel's Free Clean Fill Dirt manifests a rare and sustained vision for the sonic capacities of poetry to excite transformative processes in its readers. Hers is a prosodic practice that reminds us that the human body, comprised of water, is (we are) excellent conductors of sound. This collection invites us to be joyful participants in pronouncing seemingly chaotic rhyme schemes, but always within the poem’s logic ... and in balance with the other formal elements of the book’s ... charms. “ - Stacy Szymaszek
Pagel is the author of Twice Told, Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays), and three chapbooks. A Writers' Workshop alum, Pagel is an associate professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches poetry and nonfiction in the NEOMFA program. She is a publisher and editor at Rescue Press and the director of the CSU Poetry Center.
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