This week, I taught Erika Meitner's Ideal Cities (her first of two book publications in something like a year and a half -- wowza). Beautiful poems on motherhood, small towns, big towns, and the fears and dangers that ribbon through those places, fault lines about to rupture. The first poem (which was published first in The Journal) sets a fantastically high bar, but the rest keep up (especially a tender poem about a monster truck rally), inventive form after inventive form...
Next week, I'm teaching Kevin Prufer's In a Beautiful Country, which is one gripping little book. In this book, all of Meitner's fears come to the surface, and then some. Hello, death. Hello, machinery of war. Hello, snow and ice. Hello, numbness...almost... But: hello, love, as well. Emily Dickinson without the reassuring ambiguity (ha). Funny and fierce and a feast of sound and no easy consolation. Angels and snowflakes -- and somehow, remarkably, no sentimentality.
I recommend! I recommend!
...Ida
