<div>Erika Meitner's fourth book grapples with the widespread implications of commercialism and over-consumption, particularly in exurban America. Documentary poems originally commissioned by <I>Virginia Quarterly Review</I> 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.<BR><BR><I>Because it is an uninhabited place, because it<br>makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of<br>Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories<br>absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-<br>oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.<br>Vines knock and enter through shattered<br>drop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort<br>cracks the street's asphalt to unsolvable<br>puzzles.</I><BR><BR><B>Erika Meitner</B> was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in <I>American Poetry Review</I>, <I>Ploughshares</I>, <I>Tin House</I>, <I>The Best American Poetry 2011</I>, <I>Kenyon Review</I>, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.<BR></div>