For Now

“[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way.” —NPR

Blending humor and meditation, this wide-ranging essay by the award-winning poet and writer Eileen Myles is a candid record of the multivalent forces that shaped them as a writer. It is also a thoughtful investigation into the way that writing is inescapably enmeshed with time. Myles recounts how potential eviction from their apartment; relationships with friends, lovers, and neighbors; and the textures and identities of various cities, including New York and Marfa, Texas, all present a sense of writing as presence within time.

“Once I tasted time I never wanted anything else. . . . The only way I can prove it is that I started writing. Writing is my alibi,” they note. The author concludes that writing is a form of loving that makes living “more beautiful” because “I have time for it, I am in it.”