Eileen Myles

Harvard Book Store welcomes celebrated poet and writer EILEEN MYLES for a discussion of their highly anticipated new poetry collection, Evolution.

About Evolution

The first all-new collection of poems since 2011’s Snowflake/different streets―and following the critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as the volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice―here, in Evolution, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that enacts―like nobody else―the way we speak (inside and out) today. Evolution, with its channeling of Quakers, Fresca, and cell phones, radiates vital insight, purpose, and risk, like in these opening lines of the title poem:

Something
unearthly
about
today
so I buy
a Diet Coke &
a newspaper
a version of “me” 
something
about me on the
earth & its sneakers
& feeling like
the earth’s furniture
but that can’t be
true or like
the coke & the Times
it’s true for a little
while.

Praise

“Evolution, Eileen Myles’s first all-new collection of poetry since 2011, circles back to classic themes such as their love of dogs, loneliness, and parental loss. These poems, however, are also immediate and pressingly contemporary. Myles is conducting an intimate exchange with the government, peering into their computer and saying hello to whoever might be surveilling them.” ―Lambda Literary Foundation

“Myles relentlessly questions, analyzes, and even loathes the self, combining fanciful reveries with non sequitur in the New York School style . . . Effectively brings vague feelings into sharp relief with surprising imagery and lighter moments of mockery reveal the contradictions in human behavior . . . Myles has long excelled at capturing outsiderness, and feelings of being lost and misunderstood are plenty evident here.” ―Publishers Weekly

“Rich in vernacular and innovative line breaks, these poems ask to be read out loud . . . Myles crafts poems of a personal nature in Evolution. In very short lines, they are also reflective, contemporary, political, erotic and even aphoristic . . . In a bold collection of poems, Eileen Myles reinforces their justifiable fame as the unabashed voice of what’s left of New York’s downtown edginess.” ―Shelf Awareness

“Chicken soup for the queer soul. Eileen Myles is THE queer poet. Ruminative essays sprinkled amongst heart-wrenching poetry that makes you think and think and revisit and masticate and still there’s more. The magic of Myles is that they’re real. Every poem, every sentence is real pain, real passion, real love, through some of the most impressive command of language—sometimes it feels like Eileen Myles is the only one who speaks English and that it must be my second language because I could spend my whole life crafting semantics to capture emotion and it wouldn’t come close to theirs. All this and a political lens that is mourning, defiant, strong, and as close to 20/20 as it gets.” —Ashley Tomaszewski, Literati Bookstore