Ideal Cities

Erika Meitner's collection takes up pregnancy and motherhood, ancestry and inheritance, and everyday life in the rundown, slum-adjacent neighborhoods on the margins of Washington, DC. Across its pages, the poems pay close attention to the places people live and how those places shape them and the people in them.

Ideal Cities won the 2009 National Poetry Series Prize, selected by Paul Guest. The National Poetry Series has long championed poets who are not yet widely known, and this book is one of the titles it has produced through that program. Meitner is an American poet, and the collection is presented as the work of an emerging voice in contemporary American poetry.