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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"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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In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work “A sharply etched, unvarnished self-portrait.”—Kirkus Reviews “[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way.”—National Public Radio "This is signature Myles: the unconventional syntax, the jazzy rhythms, the total commitment to writing in the heat of the moment, not edited or modulated by concessions to linear rationality."—Phil Gambone, Gay & Lesbian Review In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time. For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

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This brilliant, incisive volume captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s.Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone. This breakthrough volume, published in 1991 by the author of Cool For You and Chelsea Girls captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Poet, novelist, lesbian culture hero and one-time presidential candidate, Myles has influenced a whole generation of young queer girl writers and activists. She is one of the most brilliant, incisive, immediate writers living today.

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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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