Search results for ""author eileen myles""

Skinny's Book of the Year, 2018In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly made an indelible impact on the writer's way of being. Over the course of sixteen years together, Myles was devoted to the pit bull and their linked quality of life. And starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow launches a playful and incisive investigation into the mostly mutually beneficial, sometimes reprehensible power dynamics between pet and pet-owner. At the same time, it reimagines Myles's experiences with alcoholism and recovery, intimacy and mourning, celebrity and politics, spirituality and family history, while joyously transcending the parameters of memoir.Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles's childhood puppet, to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull; from shimmering poetic transcriptions of video footage taken during their walks, to Rosie's final enlightened narration from the afterlife, this totally singular text combines elements of science fiction, screenplay, monologue, and lucid memory to get to the heart of how and why we dedicate our existence to our dogs.

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'Ruthlessly unguarded, surgically self-parodic and infinitely funny ... An indispensable book about friendship and intimacy; I alternately laughed and shivered as I turned the pages' GuardianThe first new poetry collection since Evolution from the peerless writer, activist and poet Eileen Myles, a "Working Life" captures the many dualities of human life: loneliness and companionship, city and country, youth and aging, travel and stasis, fear and wonder.a "Working Life" is a book rooted in the beauty of the everyday: the 'sweet accumulation' of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover's foot on the bed. These poems travel widely in planes, trains and cars around the world and by foot across the terrain of the small rooms that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. In this collection Myles shows both the beauty and ridiculousness of love and sex, articulates the immense anxieties about the future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also finds transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the radical human act of caring for one another and our world.With humour, beauty and singular vision, a "Working Life" shows Eileen Myles working at the height of their poetic and philosophical powers.

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"One of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature--honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it."--Dennis Cooper Eileen Myles has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB in 1974. BUST magazine calls her "the rock star of modern poetry" and The New York Times says she's "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde." Myles' trademark punk-lesbian sensibility and intimate knowledge of poetic tradition are at work in this eighth collection, where every love poem is political, and every political poem is, ultimately, about love. From "Home": I thought if I inventoried home it would be broad my eyes fling open like a doll's to the virtual space that suddenly resembles the walls the most interesting artists are large; monsters while the people we know are masses of flowers & when I turn on my cellphone I see everyone Eileen Myles has published over a dozen books of poetry, prose, and plays. Formerly the director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, as well as a write-in candidate for president in 1992, in 1997 Myles toured with Sister Spit's Ramblin' Road Show. Her books include Snowflake/different streets, Inferno, The Importance of Being Iceland, Skies, Maxfield Parrish, Not Me, and Chelsea Girls (stories).

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From its beginning—“My English professor’s ass was so beautiful.”—to its end—“You can actually learn to have grace. And that’s heaven.”—poet, essayist and performer Eileen Myles’ chronicle transmits an energy and vividness that will not soon leave its readers. Her story of a young female writer, discovering both her sexuality and her own creative drive in the meditative and raucous environment that was New York City in its punk and indie heyday, is engrossing, poignant, and funny. This is a voice from the underground that redefines the meaning of the word.

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''Ruthlessly unguarded, surgically self-parodic and infinitely funny ... An indispensable book about friendship and intimacy; I alternately laughed and shivered as I turned the pages'' GuardianFrom the prolific poet, activist and writer Eileen Myles, a Working Life unerringly captures the measure of life. Exploring permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder, these poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog during the pandemic lockdowns. Their lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so-future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world. With intelligence, heart and singular vision, a Working Life show

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Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018This 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.

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"One of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature--honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it."--Dennis Cooper "[Myles' writing] comes across simultaneously as effortless and utterly gorgeous...To be able to write with such gentleness and force all at the same time is such a gift, and Myles is completely generous in how she uses this."--Ron Silliman Two books meet as one in legendary poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles' newest collection. In a world overflowing with technology and its mutant offspring, moments of human ecstasy and connection are as indelible as they are fleeting. Indeed, with every page, the poems of Snowflake and different streets create poet and poem anew. some cars seem to erupt from the tar itself they seem to pull themselves up from below the surface of the land though I don't think land. I mean something flat, something black almost like a water that we're on though a dark water that holds us. Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. She was recently awarded the 2010 Shelley Memorial Award for poetry and, for her novel Inferno, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She lives in New York.

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This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York. The New York of Lynne Tillman's hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the "morons" she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman's spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

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The wear and tear of an uncertain present: a photographic account of contemporary America Massachusetts-based photographer Justin Kimball’s (born 1961) Who By Fire considers contemporary American life as it relates to a complex history of economic, religious and political environments. Kimball's work wrestles with the complications of the current moment while trying to imagine the promise of a future that is unknown and tenuous. Unflinching photographs of people in neighborhoods, streets and yards document moments where the burden of the present day visibly presses in upon bodies and physical surroundings, while also conveying the resilience and hope maintained under that weight. The people in these pictures are further contextualized by photographs that point to the visual markers of humanity in the landscape, either unintended or by design: a wall painting of a sun dial, a rising angel nailed to the side of a barn, a woman asleep on a blanket paired with a tree set on fire.

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Three decades of luminous cityscapes from downtown New York’s legendary painter-performer Multidisciplinary performer, designer and artist Tabboo! (born 1959) rose to prominence during the 1980s through New York City’s underground drag scene. When Tabboo! first moved to the city at age 23, he fell in love with the electrifying, scrappy downtown environment and began to paint cityscapes for the backdrops in his drag performances. Forty years later, the city has altered drastically but the artist’s ardor remains (he even lives in the same apartment in Alphabet City). The sweeping cityscapes gathered in this volume are reminiscent of Tabboo!’s early backdrops. Dramatic color fields render the city in moments of transition, from day into night and back again. Gleaming windows are sprinkled with glitter, scattering the sun’s brilliance as it sets. An indelible energy soaks these cityscapes, many of which depict the view from Tabboo!’s apartment window.

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Celebrated photographer Catherine Opie (born 1961) has long documented the faces and landscapes of American communities, both inside and outside the mainstream. The subjects of her highly regarded portraits have ranged from California surfers, friends and fixtures in LGBT communities, high school football players and the artist herself. In this series of photographs documenting the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Opie broadens her focus to an expanded community of Americans: on January 20, 2009, over one million people gathered on the national mall to see the swearing in of America's first black president, united by their pride at what had been accomplished and a collective hope for the future. In the tradition of Robert Frank's photographs of the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and William Eggleston's 1976 Election Eve series, Opie's Inauguration, a series of 100 photographs, offers an intimate political and personal view of one of the most public days of a nation. Accompanying texts by author, curator and photo-historian Deborah Willis and writer Eileen Myles address the significance of Opie's achievement with this body of work and further explore the wonder, elation and the self-conscious anticipations of this historic moment.

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In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

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Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006 Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category. Sometime after Andy Warhol’s heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as “Downtown.“ Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street. The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life. Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker’s short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life. With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City’s smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.

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