“All the things I respect about poetry are in the book:  wonderful wording, craft, ideas, wisdom, sensitivity, compassion . . .”             - Poet Cliff Fetters

“Unheard Music is the best collection of stories I’ve read in years. The writing . . . cuts quick and deep . . .”

- Novelist and poet
James W. Hall

“To the end, Meinke’s prose is marked by poise, lucidity, and humanity . . . Meinke offers students of poetry pragmatic strategies for experiencing the sublime as they write poems.”
             - Poet Melanie Almeder

2001 Southeast Booksellers Association Award for “Best Book of Poetry of the Year”.

“Zinc Fingers is Peter Meinke’s solid voice at its most recklessly passionate pitch, framed by the eloquent syntax of its silences.”
            -  Poet Dionisio Martinez

“[These poems] say truth, and they say it with rue, wit, shapeliness, a wonderful hand on the keyboard of metaphor.”

- Poet Alicia Ostriker

“The threats beneath attractive surfaces and the uncertain security of the outwardly contented are topics rarely treated in poems as healthy as Meinke’s; his voice is knowledgeable and reassuring.”
                   - Poet Henry Taylor

“He is especially adept at building to a strong ending or the ending that shies the poem into an unexpected but perfect place.   He also has the most endearing kind of humor, the ability to laugh at himself.”
     - Poet Judith Hemschemeyer

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Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the LSU/Southern Review Award (1986).

“His deviant talent lies in making palpable the implausible, in suggesting — sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting — things gone awry that we’d never counted on having to put in order.”                 - Writer Stephen Woodham

“An entertaining book [which] exists in a world where reality is a disgruntled invalid nursed by Whimsey and Tenderness while being constantly surprised by a troupe of vaudevillians playing pranks.”
                 - Poet Edward Field

Available through author.

Bilingual, Russian & English, illustrated by Jeanne Meinke; small hardcover (4 ½  x  6).

“He does what Shelley tells us the great poet must:  Lift the veil from the familiar to show us what is really there.”
                   - Poet Luisa Igloria

Available through author.

Winner  of   the  1996  Sow’s  Ear               Chapbook  Contest;  illustrated  by                      Jeanne Meinke.

O that my tongue were younger
and I could sing A granddaughter
is a wren in an old man’s tree
but instead I shall hold your perfect hand
mispronouncing   Will you write many letters?        Here is the spoon   The doctor cannot swim
                                  (from “Learning Italian”)

       Available through author.

Chapbook,   12    poems    with Introduction by the author.

When I was young I longed for scars
like my father’s    They were the best
scars on the block  startling  varied
pink as a tongue against his whiskey skin
                                        (from “Scars”)

      Available through author.