{"product_id":"assembled-audience-erika-meitner-9781639551552","title":"Assembled Audience: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe seventh collection by award-winning poet Erika Meitner, \u003ci\u003eAssembled Audience\u003c\/i\u003e explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"What does it mean to gather together?\" asks this fervent, frank collection. In these poems, people come together--over meals, at the beach, in protest and prayer and celebration, through vital acts of witness and collective mourning. Amid instability and peril, embodied gathering is not only a survival mechanism, but a form of resistance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eProvocative and engaging, our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, at once a Cassandra and a Pied Piper who brings us into the urgencies of the present moment: climate change, the pandemic and its aftermath, gun violence, xenophobia, fracking, eroding reproductive rights, and the moralized pressure to \"stay present\" amid disorder and danger. Over and over, we return to the hard work of existing in the Anthropocene--despite all of our knowledge, everything is perilous, and safety is an illusion.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBrutally honest and lyrically dexterous, fusing Whitman's generous expansiveness with Erika Meitner's signature virtuosic electricity and wit, \u003ci\u003eAssembled Audience\u003c\/i\u003e reminds us that forced optimism and bland platitudes won't save us--but luck and wonder might.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Erika Meitner\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1639551557\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781639551552\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Milkweed Editions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/29\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback","brand":"Erika Meitner","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48175889809663,"sku":"9781639551552","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_b0b968a4-cfd1-4a33-8548-73f9039630b6.jpg?v=1771336222","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/assembled-audience-erika-meitner-9781639551552","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}