Eileen Myles

Cool For You is a darkly comic novel that traces the downbeat progress of an Irish American girl through a series of stuttering efforts to leave home. Cool For You's tough girl narrator wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and takes us on a ferocious tour of, low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, how they do and do not get out of the hands of the family and the State.

In School of Fish Eileen Myles hooks our attention and reels it in with a pulsing, sinuous rush of images seized from urban life's experimental flow. Illuminating these densely and intensely alive new poems is an eloquent and revealing prose essay, "The Lesbian Poet", wherein Myles addresses the sources of her art, paying homage to her favorite living poets and early influences, and spelling out her own vitalist / proprioceptive aesthetic: "I think we all write out poems with our metabolism, our sexuality, for me a poem has always been an imagined body of a sort, getting that down in time, it moves this way and that, it is full of its own sense of possibility". With agility, grace and speed, Eileen Myles explores poetic possibilities, stretching linguistic boundaries while hungrily searching for the taste of life's quick core. "I have this compulsion to live no matter what..".

"In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Told in her audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed 'lesbianity,' and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer's education, and a modern tale of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the chains of the rigid cultural identity meant to define her"--Page 4 of cover

Through Snowflake's special role in the pattern of creation and life, the author gives a simple allegory on the meaning of life, its oneness and ultimate safety.

"Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes "poetics statements"--reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism." -- Publisher's description

Poet and post-punk hero Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schuyler and Björk, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing. - [MIT Press]

A collection of thrilling verse, including both new poems and beloved favorites, from the celebrated poet, modern cult icon, and author of Chelsea Girls. Eileen Myles’ work is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral. Her work opens readers to astonishing new considerations of familiar places, like the East Village in her iconic Chelsea Girls, and invites them into lush—and sometimes horrid—dream worlds, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.

Summary:Where else but Best Lesbian Erotica can you find a femme vigilante, a virgin baby butch, and a snake charmer jostling for your attention' The salacious stories of Best Lesbian Erotica 2006 will draw you in like honeyed voices from an upstairs room. In Peggy Munson's "Into the Baptismal," two farm girls decide to test their virginity pledges one rainy summer night. Renee Rivera's "Jubilee" describes a classic American rite of passage ' a trip to a trailer brothel in the Nevada desert ' but with a truck full of butch dykes in place of the local boys. In Skian McGuire's "Phoebe's Undercover Bon Voyage," a group of well-equipped tops indulge a friend's cop fetish before she ' a real cop ' goes undercover. And S. Bear Bergman's "Silver Dollar Afternoon" makes it clear that hot, boundary-breaking sex isn't the exclusive province of new love. Guest editor Eileen Myles adds her street smarts and lyrical dynamism to Tristan Taormino's annual powerhouse of riveting girl-girl erotica

Detached from the rest of the country on the eve of World War I, the tuberculosis-stricken residents of an Adirondack lakeside sanatorium are housed in accordance with their economic status and languish in their isolation before an enterprising patient initiates a weekly discussion group.

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.