Evolution
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Chelsea Girls reads like "an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer" (Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review).
The first all-new collection of poems from Eileen Myles since 2011's Snowflake/different streets, Evolution follows the author's critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as a volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice. In these new poems, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that radiates insight, purpose, and risk while channeling of Quakers, Fresca, and cell phones.
This long-awaited new collection "lopes forward in the strutting style of the witnessing and sincere, but gorgeously nonaustere, poet in New York…The gift of Evolution is its bold depiction of the textually-rendered 'I'-Eileen" (Kenyon Review).
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Myles (Afterglow) returns to familiar themes in her latest collection, ruminating on sex and intimacy, dogs, politics, and New York City. The collection opens with a speech that Myles delivered at a 2017 conference on female spirituality in which the poet recalls protesting the exclusion of LGBTQ marchers from the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade: "I never realized how outside I was until I realized they wouldn't let me in." From there, Myles moves into verse, with short, highly enjambed lines evoking a flowing stream-of-consciousness. Myles relentlessly questions, analyzes, and even loathes the self, combining fanciful reveries with non sequitur in the New York School style: "I brought/ my chalice/ up right to/ the fountain/ hi Alice/ and I drank." The poems express a forlorn weariness of contemporary politics, including the collapse of the Occupy movement and the Trump campaign's "Russian stuff." Myles effectively brings vague feelings into sharp relief with surprising imagery ("If I get/ this little/ sleep/ I'm butter/ pulling/ the greasy/ details/ over everything") and lighter moments of mockery reveal the contradictions in human behavior, such as mentioning a compliment received at the gym and simultaneously chiding an ex-lover for retweeting similar praise. Myles has long excelled at capturing outsiderness, and feelings of being lost and misunderstood are plenty evident here.
