What Nothing (Paperback or Softback)

A reckoning with the past, a bargain with memory, and a prayer for forgetting, What Nothing gives voice to someone for whom sadness is more than a feeling; it's a place of residence, familiar as a home and strange as a sudden storm. In her debut poetry collection, Anna Meister asks: how do you learn to live in a place like this? For someone who craves oblivion like salt, who knows what nothing is, staying alive is a lifetime of work. She discovers power in recognizing the dark - though naming it doesn't make it any brighter but provides a way of seeing the shadows and giving them shape. With a persistent tenderness, Meister finds the somethings that lay a path and the someones who will guide the way, as they "queerly [weave] light into all my dark." This is what we owe to one another: a hand in the darkness, a promise to be there on the other side.

Anna Meister is the author of two chapbooks, Nothing Granted (dancing girl press, 2016) and As if (Glass Poetry Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, Barrow Street, Redivider, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her debut full-length collection, What Nothing, will be published by Sundress Publications in January 2021. Meister studied poetry/memory/maps at Hampshire College and received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was the recipient of a Goldwater Writing Fellowship. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and was a finalist for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize and 2017 National Poetry Series. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa with her wife and son.