Eileen Myles

In her first book of poetry since 2007, legendary poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles creates poet and poem anew as she pushes the boundaries of her craft ever closer to the enigmatic core. Snowflake finds the poet awash in an extended and distressed landscape mediated by technology and its distortion of time and space. In different streets, the poet returns home, to the familiar world of human connection. Two books meet as one: more Eileen Myles, more indelible connection, more fleeting ecstasy.

Grainy and stripped, this gritty novel traces the downbeat progress of a Catholic, working-class lesbian coming of age in Boston. The New York Times Book Review said the author has "an exquisite sense of the borderline where people hide or are transformed according to luck or will---undramatically rich writing." Dorothy Allison said, "Eileen Myles is a genius!"

"All the lesbian intimacy you’ve yet to find on OKCupid can be found in this book." -- Lambda Literary Review 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.

A groundbreaking and candid coming-of-age novel.

Borrowing its name from the notorious '60s Ed Sanders magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, the editors have figured a way to rehone its countercultural and frictional stance with style and aplomb. A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless.

Available once again for a new generation of readers, the groundbreaking and candid coming-of-age novel in-real-time from one of America's most celebrated poets that is considered a cult classic. In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms life into a work of art. Told in her audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles’ 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; and poignant with stories of love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer’s education, and a modern chronicle of how a young female writer shrugged off the chains of a rigid cultural identity meant to define her.

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.

Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, 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 Schulyer and Bjork, 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.