Anna Meister | Glass Poetry Press

Anna Meister (As If) earned a BA in poetry/memory/maps from Hampshire College & an MFA in Poetry at New York University, where she served as a Goldwater Writing Fellow. A Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Whiskey Island, The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, BOAAT, Sugar House Review, DIAGRAM, Powder Keg, & elsewhere. Anna was a finalist for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize & was a 2015 Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Her chapbook Nothing Granted was published by dancing girl press in late 2016. She lives & works in Des Moines, IA.

In a language sensuous, vivid & entirely her own, Meister crafts a loving catalogue of incompleteness. Instead of claiming solid ground, she litters the path with questions. Her couplets see-saw between presence & loss, between as is & as if. "All day I stitch, attempting to keep things / together." Meister's line is a thread, cut suddenly by her teeth, only to begin a thought anew, only to be bit through again. She forgoes seamlessness, binaries of right or wrong, healed or broken. Instead, she prizes intimacy, boldly turning toward us to ask, "Why is this the story / I seem to need to tell?" Each poem startles us, rightly so, out of resolution & into humanness — where we are transparent & grappling & sometimes, even grateful.

— Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium