POETRY. Released October 15, 2020. One of Entropy's "Best of 2020-2021: Poetry Books and Poetry Collections" list.
Available for purchase at Barrelhouse.
Reviews at Entropy, rob mclennan's blog, and Brandi Spering's blog. Interview at Poetry Northwest.
"Gina Myers is a deeply authentic poet who intimately captures her struggles with rent, debt, work, illness, politics, and violence in the capitalist ruins of America. Throughout, she bravely confronts some of the times that she almost died and lovingly holds onto some of the times that she fully felt joy. This book is necessary reading for our precarious times." --Craig Santos Perez
"In Gina Myers' Some of the Times, Myers addresses herself, her heart, the night, and her anti-capitalist comrades with a downbeat struggle, a night wakefulness tempered always by reality. Here, the city's sirens and burnt out ruins run the same temperature as an off-handed pass me the cigarettes. Their multiple modes--photojournalistic documentary about Saginaw, litany of brushes with death--all portray the decline of American life with profound melancholia always leaning towards the jocular. With echoes of Niedecker, Myles, and Schuyler, these poems lower your guard, then break your heart; You'll want to leave them where someone else can find them--a bench, or on a bus." --Cynthia Arrieu-King
"A daughter of deindustrialized Saginaw, Gina Myers is sensitively attuned to forms of capitalist ruin: the city long after the factory closes, the wage earner barely getting by in a shit job. Whether surveying the blight and arson of her hometown or settling into a gentrifying Philadelphia, Myers tallies the manifold promises capitalism offers and never keeps: “There is an anger I carry/inside that I will never/let go of. Something basic/to hold onto while everything/else disappears.” A daybook of alienated labor and catcalls, chronic illness and summer heat, bad Philly landlords and losing sports teams, Some of the Times is also a daybook of pleasures leveraged against exploitation and misogyny, songs a worker sings to survive her work, songs a lover sings to guard her heart." --Brian Teare
Available for purchase at Barrelhouse.
Reviews at Entropy, rob mclennan's blog, and Brandi Spering's blog. Interview at Poetry Northwest.
"Gina Myers is a deeply authentic poet who intimately captures her struggles with rent, debt, work, illness, politics, and violence in the capitalist ruins of America. Throughout, she bravely confronts some of the times that she almost died and lovingly holds onto some of the times that she fully felt joy. This book is necessary reading for our precarious times." --Craig Santos Perez
"In Gina Myers' Some of the Times, Myers addresses herself, her heart, the night, and her anti-capitalist comrades with a downbeat struggle, a night wakefulness tempered always by reality. Here, the city's sirens and burnt out ruins run the same temperature as an off-handed pass me the cigarettes. Their multiple modes--photojournalistic documentary about Saginaw, litany of brushes with death--all portray the decline of American life with profound melancholia always leaning towards the jocular. With echoes of Niedecker, Myles, and Schuyler, these poems lower your guard, then break your heart; You'll want to leave them where someone else can find them--a bench, or on a bus." --Cynthia Arrieu-King
"A daughter of deindustrialized Saginaw, Gina Myers is sensitively attuned to forms of capitalist ruin: the city long after the factory closes, the wage earner barely getting by in a shit job. Whether surveying the blight and arson of her hometown or settling into a gentrifying Philadelphia, Myers tallies the manifold promises capitalism offers and never keeps: “There is an anger I carry/inside that I will never/let go of. Something basic/to hold onto while everything/else disappears.” A daybook of alienated labor and catcalls, chronic illness and summer heat, bad Philly landlords and losing sports teams, Some of the Times is also a daybook of pleasures leveraged against exploitation and misogyny, songs a worker sings to survive her work, songs a lover sings to guard her heart." --Brian Teare
POETRY. Released May 2013. One of Coldfront Magazine's "Top 40 Books of Poetry in 2013."
OUT OF PRINT. Download a free PDF.
Reviews at Vice, Small Press Book Review, ArtsATL, Fanzine, Coldfront Magazine, and elsewhere. Myers discusses the book with Keith Meatto at Guernica.
"Gina Myers' aptly-named HOLD IT DOWN chronicles the endless effort to keep a lid on hope, that feathered thing that must be denied so the rent can be paid. Everything else Pandora's box let loose has hung around—boredom, sickness, loneliness—but if hope gets out, it gets away. Moving among Brooklyn, Saginaw, and Atlanta, with a soundtrack looping Otis Redding and Johnny Cash, these poems forgo hipster irony for genuine dismay with consumerism, war, and others of the world's ills. Myers' lines break like hearts. Let her speak plainly to you: 'This is my life, / this is my life."—Evie Shockley
"Like a flâneur walking an abandoned shopping mall past boarded up storefronts, Gina Myers surveys the streets of late capitalism recording wreckage in work that gives voice to our disappointment, fear, and longing for a place where we might find some rest. 'A kitchen table does not make a home,' Myers reminds us. Moving 'in and out of / the security camera's range,' from Brooklyn to Saginaw, the poems in HOLD IT DOWN trace our 'boom & bust, minus / the boom' and serve as testimony for 'those of us who still live here' at the edges of the economy."—Susan Briante
"The poems in Gina Myers' HOLD IT DOWN seem part protest, part prayer, but not in the usual sense of either of those words. As the speakers confront a purgatorial daily grind of headlines, hangovers, debt, self-doubt, political and economic injustice, and the repeated mistakes of humankind, they never make the one 'of placing hope in seasons, / to look forward to the days to come & expect things to be better.' Instead they bear the unbearable, point at the sources of suffering and ask the question, who holds us down?"—Laura Solomon
"Since Gina Myers' move to where I grew up, her poetry carries us, as a subway line, between the Brooklyn she left and the Bible Belt of dogwood trees and Atlanta MARTA buses. Myers' is a tale of the magical mundane and a long distance love with Saginaw: part Whitman ('I stop somewhere waiting') part Stein ('What I look forward to is, is—'), and part Lorca ('Signs of summer: / tulips, baseball, & violence.'). You'll spy a heart not breaking and the work-a-day walk to happy hours in a city of drivers. You may not know where the places these poems came to life, 'but this is one / of them, one / of the best days' to visit."—Amy King
"The city we mourn was an unsustainable promise made in a time of need, like a pension. Plural. Cities. Gina Myers narrates an American exodus with heartbreaking clarity and calm; she only wants to love her neighbor and do no harm. I want to say cheer up! Nobody listened to Moses either. I want to say even more that when we finally make it past this time of brutality we repress so well, it will be important to remember what it felt like every day. HOLD IT DOWN is a beautiful, painful record of that psychic cost. Keep it safe for later. We're going to need it to live on."—Jordan Davis
OUT OF PRINT. Download a free PDF.
Reviews at Vice, Small Press Book Review, ArtsATL, Fanzine, Coldfront Magazine, and elsewhere. Myers discusses the book with Keith Meatto at Guernica.
"Gina Myers' aptly-named HOLD IT DOWN chronicles the endless effort to keep a lid on hope, that feathered thing that must be denied so the rent can be paid. Everything else Pandora's box let loose has hung around—boredom, sickness, loneliness—but if hope gets out, it gets away. Moving among Brooklyn, Saginaw, and Atlanta, with a soundtrack looping Otis Redding and Johnny Cash, these poems forgo hipster irony for genuine dismay with consumerism, war, and others of the world's ills. Myers' lines break like hearts. Let her speak plainly to you: 'This is my life, / this is my life."—Evie Shockley
"Like a flâneur walking an abandoned shopping mall past boarded up storefronts, Gina Myers surveys the streets of late capitalism recording wreckage in work that gives voice to our disappointment, fear, and longing for a place where we might find some rest. 'A kitchen table does not make a home,' Myers reminds us. Moving 'in and out of / the security camera's range,' from Brooklyn to Saginaw, the poems in HOLD IT DOWN trace our 'boom & bust, minus / the boom' and serve as testimony for 'those of us who still live here' at the edges of the economy."—Susan Briante
"The poems in Gina Myers' HOLD IT DOWN seem part protest, part prayer, but not in the usual sense of either of those words. As the speakers confront a purgatorial daily grind of headlines, hangovers, debt, self-doubt, political and economic injustice, and the repeated mistakes of humankind, they never make the one 'of placing hope in seasons, / to look forward to the days to come & expect things to be better.' Instead they bear the unbearable, point at the sources of suffering and ask the question, who holds us down?"—Laura Solomon
"Since Gina Myers' move to where I grew up, her poetry carries us, as a subway line, between the Brooklyn she left and the Bible Belt of dogwood trees and Atlanta MARTA buses. Myers' is a tale of the magical mundane and a long distance love with Saginaw: part Whitman ('I stop somewhere waiting') part Stein ('What I look forward to is, is—'), and part Lorca ('Signs of summer: / tulips, baseball, & violence.'). You'll spy a heart not breaking and the work-a-day walk to happy hours in a city of drivers. You may not know where the places these poems came to life, 'but this is one / of them, one / of the best days' to visit."—Amy King
"The city we mourn was an unsustainable promise made in a time of need, like a pension. Plural. Cities. Gina Myers narrates an American exodus with heartbreaking clarity and calm; she only wants to love her neighbor and do no harm. I want to say cheer up! Nobody listened to Moses either. I want to say even more that when we finally make it past this time of brutality we repress so well, it will be important to remember what it felt like every day. HOLD IT DOWN is a beautiful, painful record of that psychic cost. Keep it safe for later. We're going to need it to live on."—Jordan Davis
POETRY. August 2009.
Available for sale at SPD Books or as a free downloadable PDF. Reviewed at Open Letters Monthly and Sink Review.
"Reading Gina Myers is like the pleasure of listening to the most quiet notes in Morty Feldman's music. It's a green music where everything is convincing, simply refined and secretly fiery. The poetry seems to have taken a polygraph test and has the truthfulness of an injured voice. Photographs of loving are here and also the very global shifts between her Michigan and her New York. It's humble and observant as the figurative art of Schuyler, but there is always a funny pointillism that points to nothing except love without hope. A whole year in single sighs, the scale being life-size: a world of yes and no, a long poem in arpeggios, and full disclosure as a fear and poetics."—David Shapiro
"Gina Myers's A MODEL YEAR contains more grace, precision, and wisdom than I've encountered in one place for some time. Myers writes with a melancholic confidence that is all her own, but which also pays homage to an exquisite assortment of ghosts, poetic and otherwise. 'We each have our own word for loneliness,' she writes, and her poems relentlessly chart the contours of emptiness, stasis, silence, and longing. Their sadness is everywhere laced, however, with inspiring, life-sustaining forms of honesty and generosity. 'I'd like to give all the quiet things to you,' Myers writes—and here, in pitch-perfect language, in poem after poem, she does."—Maggie Nelson
"In A MODEL YEAR damaged objects abound: chipped picture frames, rusted shopping carts, crushed beer cans, people. In her first collection, Gina Myers deftly shows us how one person's trash might still be trash, but continue to serve a physical or emotional function. It's as if you came upon WCW's wheelbarrow after someone took a sledgehammer to it and scattered the chickens. Even though the wheelbarrow is dented and warped, you still need something to cary your baggage."—Dustin Williamson
"Gina Myers's remarkable ear and her New York School sprezzatura can transform the consciousness in any room. She is one of the strongest of the new poets, and her brilliant book is a gift to us all."—Joseph Lease
Available for sale at SPD Books or as a free downloadable PDF. Reviewed at Open Letters Monthly and Sink Review.
"Reading Gina Myers is like the pleasure of listening to the most quiet notes in Morty Feldman's music. It's a green music where everything is convincing, simply refined and secretly fiery. The poetry seems to have taken a polygraph test and has the truthfulness of an injured voice. Photographs of loving are here and also the very global shifts between her Michigan and her New York. It's humble and observant as the figurative art of Schuyler, but there is always a funny pointillism that points to nothing except love without hope. A whole year in single sighs, the scale being life-size: a world of yes and no, a long poem in arpeggios, and full disclosure as a fear and poetics."—David Shapiro
"Gina Myers's A MODEL YEAR contains more grace, precision, and wisdom than I've encountered in one place for some time. Myers writes with a melancholic confidence that is all her own, but which also pays homage to an exquisite assortment of ghosts, poetic and otherwise. 'We each have our own word for loneliness,' she writes, and her poems relentlessly chart the contours of emptiness, stasis, silence, and longing. Their sadness is everywhere laced, however, with inspiring, life-sustaining forms of honesty and generosity. 'I'd like to give all the quiet things to you,' Myers writes—and here, in pitch-perfect language, in poem after poem, she does."—Maggie Nelson
"In A MODEL YEAR damaged objects abound: chipped picture frames, rusted shopping carts, crushed beer cans, people. In her first collection, Gina Myers deftly shows us how one person's trash might still be trash, but continue to serve a physical or emotional function. It's as if you came upon WCW's wheelbarrow after someone took a sledgehammer to it and scattered the chickens. Even though the wheelbarrow is dented and warped, you still need something to cary your baggage."—Dustin Williamson
"Gina Myers's remarkable ear and her New York School sprezzatura can transform the consciousness in any room. She is one of the strongest of the new poets, and her brilliant book is a gift to us all."—Joseph Lease
Chapbooks
Philadelphia, Barrelhouse, February 2017
False Spring, Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2012
Behind the R, ypolita press, 2009
Stanzas in Imitation, New School University, 2007
Fear of the Knee Bending Backward, H_NGM_N, 2006
Saginaw, Boog City, 2003
False Spring, Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2012
Behind the R, ypolita press, 2009
Stanzas in Imitation, New School University, 2007
Fear of the Knee Bending Backward, H_NGM_N, 2006
Saginaw, Boog City, 2003