Holy Moly Carry Me
Holy Moly Carry Me is the fifth collection by Erika Meitner, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner for her collection Ideal Cities. HOT TOPICS: contemporary politics, gun control/gun culture, school shootings, parenthood, infertility, biracial adoption (current series in NY Times), natural disasters, religion.
Strong regional/national appeal: The collection focuses heavily on life in Appalachia and offers the unique perspective of a Jewish author living in the heart of “Trump country” (i.e., the coal/Bible Belt region of rural Virginia). Meitner offers a nuanced look at gun culture and Appalachian voters that will be of interest to urbanites and coastal readers. Several poems also describe Meitner’s returning to New York City after living in rural Appalachia.
Meitner’s work is confessional, autobiographical, political, narrative, sincere, and accessible. Her work is deeply engaged with the present zeitgeist and offers a window into contemporary US culture via an immensely personal look at an individual’s life. The collection engages with a wide range of subjects and will appeal to a broad audience.
Parenthood is a strong theme throughout the collection, particularly struggles with fertility and her family’s decision to adopt a child of another race. Meitner also describes the anxiety many mothers face over school shootings, racial prejudice, and raising children in an uncertain world.
Meitner is well-connected to poets and reviewers throughout the US. Her previous BOA collection received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was reviewed in The Rumpus and The New York Times Magazine,Unique perspective: Jewish author living in the heart of “Trump country”; a daughter of refugees & the granddaughter Holocaust survivors reflecting on current refugee crisis.
Meitner has connections to Jewish community centers, universities, and bookstores throughout the Eastern United States, with particularly strong connections in New York City, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Detroit.
Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner, Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2015, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and she has also received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing.
