BOA, paperback Publication Date: September 09, 2014 Publisher Marketing: Erika Meitner's fourth book grapples with the widespread implications of commercialism and over-consumption, particularly in exurban America. Documentary poems originally commissioned by Virginia Quarterly Review examine the now-bankrupt city of Detroit, once the thriving heart of the American Dream. Meitner probes the hulking ruins of office buildings, tract housing, superstores, construction sites, and freeways--exposing a vacuous world of decay and abandonment--while holding out hope for re-birth from ashes. Because it is an uninhabited place, because itmakes me hollow, I pried open the pages ofDetroit: the houses blanked out, factoriesabsorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.Vines knock and enter through shattereddrop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwortcracks the street's asphalt to unsolvablepuzzles.
