Ideal Cities

Abstract

Erika Meitner discusses her new book: Ideal Cities. This collection of autobiographical narrative and lyric poems explores the relationship between body and place—specifically the pleasures and dangers of women’s corporeal experiences. Ideal Cities is guided by an epigraph from Song of Songs, and the metaphorical idea of bodies as cities, and cities as bodies. How do women’s bodies become sites of inscription via sex, childbirth, and other highly physical acts? These poems also investigate urban, suburban, and rural borderlands. Who do we leave behind or look past? What do we discard, as purposeful markers or accidental refuse? How can these people, places, and objects be woven into larger ideas about nature, sense of place, home, exile, and both personal and collective memory?