, forthcoming with New Issues Poetry and Prose spring 2017
HarperCollins. 2006.
Anthologies
Reviews
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"These new poems from Nadine Meyer are lushly stark and beautifully forbidding. They deal with family and death and hope, “a diminishing triangle of light on the sea.” They deal with the “well-lit emptiness” of toasts and prayers. The music is intoxicating and, at times, fairy-talish and completely absorbing. The poems in Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum face down their ghosts — in “Go” a mother's final breathes are experienced first hand, from the interior. There's bravery here and lasting wisdom. We may want such gifts from our poetry, though we seldom get them." - Philip Schultz
"I admire the fierce attentiveness of Nadine Sabra Meyer’s poems: their formal elegance, their elegiac habit. Her subject is the body in pleasure, the body in pain, the mutable body, and the legible body. I am reminded of the care and rare mastery of such poets as Louise Bogan, Anthony Hecht, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank Bidart. Meyer’s poems are at once intimate and complex, lyrically taut and narratively captivating."- Eric Pankey
"Nadine Meyer is that rarest of things these days, a poet of ideas. Rarer still, she's a poet who manages to present her ideas through the manifold pleasures of a highly refinded lyrical imagination. Which is to say, her poetry demands to be taken seriously in the only way that poetry can: She makes a reader feel what it feels like to think the way she thinks. With The Anatomy Theater, Ms. Meyer takes her place in that long and illustrious line of poets whose spiritual or intellectual concerns form the core of their aesthetic program. It is a wonderfully accomplished first book of poems."- Sherod Santos
"Nadine Sabra Meyer's Anatomy Theater is a powerful and harrowing book. In it the human figure is reduced to its primary elements--musculature, organs, bone--yet remains palable and present. The transcendent is completely exorcised, 'as thoughts decompose under anesthesia / then cease to exist.' This is a poetry without a trace of sentimentality or specious celebration, yet it remains grimly affirmative as it 'distills / from the stench of flesh, pure thought.' The language is riveting, and the lines have a sinuous complexity that is hypnotic. Meyer's unit of composition is the sentence, that is to say the thought, and she writes at a high level of tension. As the book unfolds the focus expands from the biological to the aesthetic, the personal and the historical, groping towards the possibility of escaping 'the body's domesticity for a sky both lightning struck and mute,' and of the transformation of anatomy into history. The Anatomy Theater is a stunning debut."- John Koethe
