Author Event with Poet Erika Meitner

An evening with poet Erika Meitner in conversation with Danny Caine, celebrating her seventh poetry collection, Assembled Audience!
About this Event

6:30pm Wednesday, November 11
at Prologue Bookshop

The seventh collection by award-winning poet Erika Meitner, Assembled Audience explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world.

“What does it mean to gather together?” asks this fervent, frank collection. In these poems, people congregate—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. Our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, provocative and engaging, both 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.

Erika Meitner is the author of seven books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the MFA program. Find out more about her at erikameitner.com.

Danny Caine's chapbook is the winner of the 2024 Sarabande Books Cahapbook Contest. He's also the author of the poetry collections , , ​, and , as well as the books , , and ​. His poetry has appeared in , ​, , , and , and his prose has appeared in and . The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association awarded him the 2019 Midwest Bookseller of the Year award. He is a former co-owner of the Raven Book Store, Publishers Weekly's 2022 bookstore of the year.