Eileen Myles Knihy

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.

This unique collection by an award-winning writer serves as a global anthology featuring lesser-known classics from literary luminaries such as Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks, alongside emerging voices. It delves into the politics of pathos and emotion, revitalizing the term "pathetic." Eileen Myles, in their bold introduction, asserts that "Literature is pathetic," reclaiming the word from its negative connotations and restoring its original meaning rooted in inspiring emotion, as derived from the ancient Greek concept of pathos. The anthology showcases a diverse range of 105 contributors, including literary giants like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rumi, as well as queer icons and revolutionaries such as Dodie Bellamy and Bob Flanagan. It also features fresh perspectives from rising writers like Nicole Wallace and Precious Okoyomon. The collection blends creative nonfiction by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and Jack Halberstam with poetry from Natalie Diaz and Lucille Clifton, alongside prose by Chester Himes and Chris Kraus. The result is an extraordinary anthology that fosters an ongoing dialogue while serving as an essential compendium of queer, revolutionary, and moving literature. It navigates themes of suffering, embarrassment, and solace, offering a rich taxonomy of ways to embrace a "pathetic" existence in a polarized world.

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work

A poet and post-punk heroine writes on subjects ranging from Bjoerk to Robert Smithson, from traveling in Iceland to walking in Thoreau's footsteps on Cape Cod

"Set in the post-martial-law era of 1990s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman who is alternately hot and cold toward her, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes the devil-may-care, rich-kid-turned-criminal Meng Sheng and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover Chu Kuang, as well as the bored, mischievous overachiever Tun Tun and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend Zhi Rou. Bursting with the optimism of newfound liberation and romantic idealism despite corroding innocence, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant and intimate masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature"--

In this autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young queer artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, laughter, and discovery, 'Chelsea Girls' is a funny, cool, and intimate account of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the imposition of a rigid cultural identity. Told in her audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, 'Chelsea Girls' weaves 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 1970's and 80's New York

This new collection of poems by Eileen Myles, Evolution, finds our game-changing writer keying lines in an idiomatic, euphoric style that the New York Times has called "one of the essential voices in American poetry"

The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder. “Working Life” is a book transfixed by 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 arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles's 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 also 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” shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.

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.