Assembled Audience (Poems)

These poems are deeply generous to the reader, serious and playful, alchemizing and liberating."—Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Goldenrod

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 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.