Copia

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 it

makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of

Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories

absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-

oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.

Vines knock and enter through shattered

drop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort

cracks the street's asphalt to unsolvable

puzzles.*

**Erika Meitner** was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in *American Poetry Review*, *Ploughshares*, *Tin House*, *The Best American Poetry 2011*, *Kenyon Review*, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.