Description
Book SynopsisFinalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019
New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018
This new book of poems and essays by Eileen Myles finds our game-changing writer keying lines in the euphoric style that the New York Times has called 'one of the essential voices in American poetry.'
Following the critically claimed Afterglow (a dog memoir) and I Must Be Living Twice, their career-spanning selected poems, Evolution is Myles' first all-new poetry collection since 2011's Snowflake/different streets. These new poems upend genre in a vernacular that enacts, like nothing else, the way we speak (inside and out today). From walking around Marfa and New York City with an orange pit bull to Eileen's transcendent acceptance speech as President, Evolution lifts a can of Diet Coke as an End-of-the-World toast to embodiment, irreverence and risk.
Trade ReviewI loved
Evolution by Eileen Myles: poems that lope along, chatty, restless and limber. -- Olivia Laing * New Statesman *
Eileen Myles's essential poetry is the hip kid leaning against their locker secretly burning with intensity, the smartest boy in the class who doesn't care he has a scar down his face, the thing you just wish you'd said. -- Lena Dunham
Myles's poetry is kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary, and timeless. -- Maggie Nelson
Myles is often referred to as an 'institution' - the way one speaks of a terrific restaurant that's endured the waves of gentrification as a 'New York institution.' But the word bounces off her: there is nothing official about her, nothing staid or still. -- Ben Lerner * Paris Review *
Part of Myles's enduring appeal is that she's experimental in the true sense of the word; every time you turn around, she's up to something different . . . People have started using the word legend when talking about her life and work. * New York Magazine *
Myles forces a cultural and a literary reckoning with her life on her own terms, demanding understanding, the text held to the reader's throat. * Los Angeles Review of Books *
