Useful Junk
We think we have many homes, but our only home is the body—these space-time machines, these sculptures of fluid and rind and scaffolding, of breath and membrane and pleasure
In Erika Meitner’s “The Practice of Depicting Matter as It Passes from Radiance to Decomposition,” from her sixth collection of poems, Useful Junk, the body is something to interpret and behold, mysterious, even numinous, in its carnal entanglements with the world. “Body” is so central to Meitner’s poetic practice that she repeats the word over 60 times in this book: from “your / body folded into mine” to “this small body of a poem” to “the infinite un- / speakableness of the body” to—twice—“my body my body my body.”
If it is common for contemporary poets to use the body in the Whitmanian “body electric” sense, in the post-Foucauldian sense of political control and “power over the body,” and in feminist and BIPOC formulations, Meitner personalizes her usage to that of a 40-something woman with partner and children, poised between the memory of lovers in her youth and “the entropy of bodies over time.” When the speaker in “Beyond Which” (“The Irish photographer”) unravels the artistry of a nude photograph, her description also applies to the poems in Useful Junk itself:
[…]the exact way a specific body part
(curved elbow, erect cock, hollowed collarbone) catches
time to repeat in image: a hook snagging a thread, pulling
until we unravel into a new form—not reduced, but changed—a place beyond which—a trace, exalted. […]
In poems that range from ekphrastic pieces to profane epistolary meditations to philosophical parody to headlong, luge-like poems in thrall to polysyndeton, Meitner’s effort to create “a trace, exalted” is restless, alternately carefree and exacting, with a desire for transcendence that heeds the mortal limits of our materiality, as in “Beyond Which” (“my seatbelt is fastened”):
[…]we embrace
the hard and sweet dumbness
of the physical world—its
mute wreckage, the things that
vanish and vanish and vanish—
hush