Holy Moly Carry Me

by Erika Meitner

Winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Erika Meitner’s fifth collection of poetry plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia―its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger―as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Genres: Poetry, Adult

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 2018

About the author

Erika Meitner is the author of 6 books of poems, including Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011); Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. Her most recent book, Useful Junk, is due out from BOA Editions in April of 2022. Her work has appeared most recently in The New Yorker, The Believer,VQR, Orion, The New Republic and elsewhere. She is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech.

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is not quite as jocular as I thought on first glance: Meitner gives an extended etymological look at the word "Moly" and it seems to go back at least to the ancient Egyptians. Who knew?

As a poet from the Bronx, Meitner gives me hope, finding poetry in malls and urban blights. "The sadness of Cleveland". Meitner covers ground from the Jewish holocaust to racism to our vulnerable bodies. And she does it in formally satisfying and linguistically beautiful writing.

I found the poems touching to the point of heartache, loving, gentle, and hard as steel. A mother's love, our love of life, the overwhelming world we live in and how we attempt to survive it.

A beautiful collection.

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erika Meitner has been one of my favorite poets ever since Inventory at the All-Night Drug Store, and I was so excited to get this collection. There are many poems that literally take your breath away. You give that little visceral *gasp* and catch your breath while you're reading them. Some of them for me are:

Double Sonnet Ending in New Testament
On the Road
Dollar General
The Clock of the Long Now

This is really a phenomenal book. I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inserting pop culture or name-brand America into poetry can sometimes be really hard to do authentically and meaningfully, but Erika Meitner is sooooooo so good at it, braiding strip malls and consumerism and motherhood and politics and gun violence together so perfectly.

[Martha Silano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was heartened to find HOLY MOLY CARRY ME among the finalists for the 2018 NBCC Award in poetry. It's a rocking and rolling book! I love how the speaker finds herself in conversation with the masses in places like the Dollar Store, Kroger, and Walmart. Meitner is a poet of witness but not of judgment. She is a mom, a traveler, a resistor, and a blesser who struggles to remain hopeful despite mass shootings, poverty, beheadings, executions, throat slashings, & racially charged graffiti, to name a few. Meitner's voice is reassuring, down-to-earth. It's like you're hanging out with her on one of her many long drives to and from her sons' schools. She keeps the reader's interest by taking us by the hand and showing us the United States we currently occupy, this "HolyMolyLand":

"a place we all pass through (of violence, of revelation) with grand opening
flags strung above fenced-in lots & railroad crossings."

A land where

"The security guards ask us to remove everything from our pockets--even lint."

She is not offering solutions or panaceas for our apocalyptic times. Instead of reassurance, she offers how

"The streets belong to no one
and everyone and are a guide
for motion ..."

which I take to mean that we are all to be blamed or thanked for how history will look back on the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Yet, as much as Meitner is speaking for all of those who are outraged about the increasing gun violence and emboldened racist acts, Meitner's poetic gifts are most prominent when she's talking about herself - her own predicament of living in a college town and raising two sons, one of them more of a target:

"More like I would invent a future where my black son will not
get shot by police for playing in a park, or driving, or walking from his
broken-down car."

Dang, it's easy to procure a gun in West Virginia ("You need only be eighteen and / bring two forms of ID"), yet no state in our union has sufficiently stood up against the NRA and all those who believe in the right to bear arms.

Meitner positions herself smack-dab in the middle of the firestorm, and yet she remains capable of being stopped in her tracks by the sound of wind chimes outside the Food Lion, by the notion that we could all be connected together by music:

What if
they trailed after us wherever we went
as though our actual steps on concrete
or asphalt or linoleum generated song ...
your cart my cart that beverage
aisle: our trembling jittery refrain.

It’s this do-si-do between the personal and the populace that kept this reader rapt.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

U.S. life— a great book of poetry

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am waiting. I am waiting

for my salad-to-go. I will walk back
across the strip mall parking lot,

CVS bag tucked into my purse,
past one blue shopping cart, knocked

over, joy-ridden. There is no part
of the reproduction process that is not

fraught, and as soon as the automatic
motel doors part, I will feel stabbing

cramps, get my period in the elevator up.
In my room, beyond the blackout curtains

lighted signs on sticks raise their hands
in the dusk: Marathon, Schnucks,

McDonald's golden arches tenting
the night with overwhelming sadness.

There are questions no one can answer
for me, no matter how long

I wait patiently. O vacant space.
O single-lined body of flesh and blood.

from "On the Road"

Erika Meitner's Holy Moly Carry Me is, hands-down, one of my favorite poetry collections. I love her style, her imagery, and, most importantly, I especially love her humor. The poetic voice is wistful with a chuckle. She explores a lot of dark territory, but she does so deftly. Her meandering narratives move from association to association, but everything coheres into a vision of how messed up things are and how blessed we are to be a part of it.

This is an incredibly powerful collection of verse and I highly recommend it.

The next morning's
paper sports a photo of LeBron embracing
power forward Kevin Love, next to headlines
about Venezuelan food riots, triple-digit
temperatures in the West, vigils for
victims of the Orlando massacre, and
the Colorado woman who fought off
a mountain lion attacking her five-your-old
son--literally reached into the animal's
mouth and wrested his head from its jaws.
Too strong. In the belly of fear and rust
and shame there is no such thing.
To pry open something with your bare
hands, look into the gaping maw
of the beast that eats your sons--
the lion, the bullets, the streets, racist
cops, heroin, despair, whatever is most
predatory and say, Enough--we will triumph,
motherfuckers.

from "Too Strong"

[Katie Karnehm-Esh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. LOVED. IT.

[Ja'net · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did. There were definitely some gems in here, but I found myself slogging through most of this book, struggling to find the music in Meitner's long, detail-laden lines that seemed to erase themselves almost immediately after I read them.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Well, this collection did not end up being what I expected after reading the introductory poem. I thought it would be a lot more conceptual, but instead, it often gets bogged down in too much realism. These are maximalist poems, heavy with detail, and the connections Meitner tries to make did not always feel effective to me. But there are also plenty of brilliant lines to latch onto, and the subject matter is very timely. "Dollar General" and "Our Holiday Letter" were some of my favorites. I will definitely check out future work from Meitner.

[Karen Maskarinec · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely poetic immersion into EM's life in Virginia - poetic but realistic, too, with grocery carts and used condoms (and other stuff of day to day life) acknowledged as part of the landscape, and of the fabric of life. The key word is HOLY: I really love how EM brings it all together: all the experiences and emotions, the positive and the negative, and names it all HOLY.
Erika Meitner is a treasure. I look forward to reading all her previous and future publications, and encourage all my friends, and anyone who appreciates contemporary poetry, to read it, too.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew.

I've been thinking about how to review this fantastic volume of poetry since I finished it late last night.

And I am just not sure that I have the words.

It's topical and timeless, timid at times, but fiercely tireless. It is so absolutely worth your time.

I folded over the top of nearly every page.

It's just that good.

Read it. Really. Just do.

You won't be sorry.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular book, both in whole and in pieces. It takes me a long time to read it because I want to go slowly and also reread when I feel like it. Very relevant to current times, and I found certain details relevant personally, like the author's mention of an adopted son. I'll definitely be looking out for more from this poet in the future.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic read. I really admire how Meitner is able to weave so many seemingly disparate strands into a single poem. I also like her expertise at investigating the near at hand--the Food Lion parking lot, the detritus after a college football team win. Lovely book.

[(a)lyss(a) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of poems examining race and family in the modern world.

Looking at a family with one white son and one black the author shows us pieces of their life and thoughts that go with it around lockdowns and police and raising children.

[Zara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of these poems felt like a punch in the gut. Meitner jumps between motherhood, the Holocaust, infertility, school shootings, immigration, poverty, race... I don’t remember what made me look for this collection, but I’m excited to read more by her.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We agree / to rescue each other and strangers / who also glance sideways at street / grids from above during takeoff, / chew gum while we rise past what- / ever their threshold for fear or adventure."

[Maryann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really love the sense of place in these pieces, as well as the mix of cultures that appear. I also loved that I knew exactly who was being referenced when a vulture expert was mentioned. I just sort of stopped reading and thought, I know Katie!

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book examines the complexities of contemporary life and offers support, strength, hope, and humor. I adore the book's title, and the titles of the poems within do not disappoint either. This is a rollercoaster collection, and I mean that in the best possible way!

[Audette Leites · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just lovely. Timely and ageless. The writing is beautiful but verg accessible.

[Hannah Notess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah it was so good

[Francescajemm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t be afraid of this book of prose poetry! Very important reading for anyone thinking about/worried about/stymied by our current gun culture.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed group of poems. Some are awesome, some merely OK. Meitner is definitely a talent to watch.

[Abner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rich set of poems that ranged far and wide. I very much liked her conversational approach to them.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a fan of her style of poetry, observational, sometimes talky, about her family/children/the world.
Highly recommended.

[Adam Sol]

There's a lot to like here.

[Marie Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are beautiful, honest, heartbreaking poems.

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The future is throttling towards us and it’s loud and reckless."

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a collection. “Too Strong,” and “Threat Assessment,” will stay with me always.

[Marianne Mersereau · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm partial to narrative poems, and these poems are stories well told.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is so legit. I could not love Meitner's work more.