Works & Days (Radiator Press, 2025)
“‘What is it that keeps you alive’ asks the final line of Gina Myers’ Works & Days. From TED Talks on gratitude and ‘Motivational Monday’ emails from her boss to punk and country classics seemingly spinning endlessly on a jukebox in a working-class neighborhood bar, Myers has created nothing short of a poetic catalog of gig economy work. These sharp and sentient poems detail and celebrate the daily anti-celebrations of our wasted working lives.” —Mark Nowak
Learn more: https://radiatorpress.org/product/works-days-by-gina-myers/
Some of the Times (Barrelhouse, 2020)
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
Purchase the book: https://www.barrelhousemag.com/books/some-of-the-times
Hold It Down (2015)
"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
Download/read for free at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/hold-it-down-gina-myers
A Model Year (2009)
"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 won, 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
Download/read for free at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/model-year-myers-proof-3.25.09