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    Holy Moly Carry Me
    Holy Moly Carry Me
    Holy Moly Carry Me
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Holy Moly Carry Me

    By Erika Meitner

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    About this ebook

  • Holy Moly Carry Me is the fifth collection by Erika Meitner, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner for her collection Ideal Cities. ;i>







  • 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, among others.







  • 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.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateSep 11, 2018
    ISBN9781942683636
    Holy Moly Carry Me
    Author

    Erika Meitner

    Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk (BOA, 2022); Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia (BOA, 2014); and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Believer. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner lives in rural southwest Virginia and is currently a Professor of English at Virginia Tech.

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      Book preview

      Holy Moly Carry Me - Erika Meitner

      [image: cover]

      Copyright © 2018 by Erika Meitner

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      First Edition

      18  19  20  21  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail permdude@gmail.com.

      Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Lannan Foundation; the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 108 for special individual acknowledgments.

      Cover Design: Sandy Knight

      Cover Art: Armagarden by Jeff Gibson

      Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

      Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

      BOA Logo: Mirko

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Meitner, Erika, 1975–

      Title: Holy moly carry me : poems / by Erika Meitner.

      Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018. | Series: American poets continuum series ; No. 166

      Identifiers: LCCN 2018014184 (print) | LCCN 2018019301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683636 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683629 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      Classification: LCC PS3613.E436 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.E436 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014184

      BOA Editions, Ltd.

      250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

      Rochester, NY 14607

      www.boaeditions.org

      A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Copyright

      HolyMolyLand

      Austerity

      Medium / Message

      Continuation

      Hat Trick

      Double Sonnet Ending in New Testament

      On the Road

      Diaspora

      Images from the Archives of the Institute for Esoteric Research

      Dollar General

      Elegy for the Body Before It’s Released from Grief and into Light

      Our Holiday Letter

      And Still We Gather with Infinite Momentum

      De Soto Park

      What Follows Is a Reconstruction Based on the Best Available Evidence

      HolyMolyLand

      Peregrinus

      No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen

      Factography: Hometown

      The Clock of the Long Now

      Loss Prevention Starts with You

      But My Heart Is Wild and My Bones Are Steel

      Post-Game-Day Blessing

      Vicissitudes

      Your Rivers, Your Margins, Your Diminutive Villages

      Poem with Warehouse Fire & Disaster Recovery Team

      Too strong

      Insane Flying Machines

      Threat Assessment

      Jackhammering Limestone

      I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Colophon

      ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας πόρε φάρμακον ἀργεϊφόντης

      ἐκ γαίης ἐρύσας, καί μοι φύσιν αὐτοῦ ἔδειξε.

      ῥίζῃ μὲν μέλαν ἔσκε, γάλακτι δὲ εἴκελον ἄνθος:

      μῶλυ δέ μιν καλέουσι θεοί: χαλεπὸν δέ τ᾽ ὀρύσσειν

      ἀνδράσι γε θνητοῖσι, θεοὶ δέ τε πάντα δύνανται.

      • • •

      He pulled the magic plant from the ground.

      Its root was black, and its flower was white

      as milk. The gods call it moly. Mortals cannot

      uproot it, but the gods can do whatever they like.

      —The Odyssey, Book X (l. 302–306)

      HOLYMOLYLAND

      In The Odyssey there’s mention of a plant called moly, which is sacred and harvested only by the gods.

      The gods are vengeful but they are also good to us, though we have given up sacrifices and burnt offerings.

      With regard to burnt offerings, the following is a concise statement of the Levitical law: these were wholly animal, and the victims were wholly consumed.

      The Animal Gang was a marauding group of hooligans who used potatoes studded with razor blades during pitched battles on the streets of Dublin in the 1930s.

      Which is to say that the moley was an ordinary potato, its surface jagged with metal edges.

      Holy moley! was Captain Marvel’s characteristic exclamation of surprise.

      Because the oath might have been offensive to some, Holy Moly was used in the late 1920s as a jocular euphemism for Holy Moses.

      Holy Moses is also a German thrash metal band, known for its lead singer Sabina Classen—one of the first and only women to use a death growl.

      Moses demanded the release of the Israelites from slavery, and led them out of Egypt and across the Red Sea. After 40 years of wandering in the desert, he died within sight of the promised land.

      In A Dictionary of the Underworld, ‘moley’ is preceeded by ‘mokker’—Yiddish for maker.

      ‘Mokker’ is a variation of ‘macher,’ which also means someone who arranges, fixes, or has connections. The person who could miraculously produce a visa or get an exit permit for a Jew was known

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