"These cool hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl coming of age and being of age are full of startling detail and vivid setting. Meitner's range wit compassion and her alertness to the moments where domestic and collective experience intersect make these poems memorable. This book is a seriously good read"-Daisy Fried
Erika Meitner's first book INVENTORY AT THE ALL- NIGHT DRUGSTORE won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2003. Her second book Ideal Cities was selected as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series and was published by Harper Perennial in August 2010. Her third collection of poems MAKESHIFT INSTRUCTIONS FOR VIGILANT GIRL was published by Anhinga Press in 2011. Her poems have appeared recently in Tin House The Southern Review Indiana Review APR Slate VQR and The New Republic. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech where she teaches in the MFA program.
"Whether working from memories of girlhood or accounts of alien abduction these poems trace the seam of the fantastic and the quotidian carefully mapping the way each slides into the other. Meitner's poems are at once smooth and explosive combustible engines of propulsive force. Vigilance meets the makeshift when precise attention leads to new assessment the transformation of the self indivisible from self knowledge." --Jason Schneiderman author of Striking Surface
"These cool hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl coming of age and being of age are full of startling detail and vivid setting. Meitner's range wit compassion and her alertness to the moments where domestic and collective experience intersect make these poems memorable. This book is a seriously good read. "--Daisy Fried author of My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
"Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a sexy funny smart book full of crack-the-whip language. Meitner climbs the scaffolding of different kinds of rhetoric -- the abduction narrative the extraterrestrial encounter the customs declaration form the marriage vow to provide startling insight into questions of truth and its constructions. For its music for its stylistic variety for its ambition and for its delights this instruction manual proves its worth again and again." --Beth Ann Fennelly author of Unmentionables
