Anna Meister

What Nothing Anna Meister

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.