“It’s hopeful when the writer is a poet because they don’t feel the allegiance to the rules the way prose writers do. Their use of commas, of punctuation, yields completely to the truth of the thing being described rather than some outside prescription. Myles’s metaphors here are wild. ‘A tropical movie’? What is that? Myles is inventing this thing to compare sex to, and it is absolutely working, but it is breaking a lot of the rules. And I think when we break boundaries, it doesn’t matter if we’re using familiar language. It’s going to feel defamiliarized and fresh to us.”

Now Myles is older than Lowell when he died, and enjoying her greatest moment of accomplishment and fame. Her very presence in the world is a form of activism, but her work, when studied with care, is also political in the sense that it gives evidence of one of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you’re likely to find. When, many years from now, she passes away, may she be elegized rudely by some brat clearing the nettles from her path, just the way she did with Lowell (and, in a more complex gesture, with Schuyler). This kind of schoolyard insult—“The guy was a loon”—is almost hilariously transparent as an expression of desire, and it is part of what the art’s all about.

To read the rest of the review, visit The New York Review of Books.

I think part of what you’re doing when you’re doing something new is that you don’t entirely know that you’re doing it. You almost don’t pay attention. You’re paying more attention to the rhythm than the thing that you’re saying, so there’s a lot of extra language hanging outside the building that you sort of allow to be there so that you’re not always looking at the building. It’s very constructed in a certain way, but I almost don’t want to know that so I can keep building what I’m making from the inside. It’s like when I’m in charge of a flow, and that thing has to keep coming at all costs, so part of my performance as a writer, in the act of writing, is to pretend that I don’t know. I like a little bit of oblivion. I’m safe in that. And it can keep accruing in this kind of way. The overarching thing is just reaching inside. It’s almost the invisible part of the form, like in any violent action movie when you see somebody get killed, and they keep heaving, and it’s like with writing—there’s a thing that keeps heaving. My whole consciousness likes to stay as close as possible to falling apart, but not letting it entirely end. That’s my pleasure.

To read the rest of the interview, visit Interview Magazine.

In the Paris Review, Myles discusses her work with Ben Lerner. An excerpt of this interview is available on Lit Hub.

New York Magazine profiles Miles and celebrates the recent attention she’s received. The Guardian and New Yorker likewise applaud her much deserved surge in popularity.

To read the full list, click here

When talking about Inferno and the character Eileen Myles, you once said “Like everybody else, I really don’t know who I am.” Does writing help you get any closer to figuring out who you are? Do you think someday you’ll know?

No. Absolutely not. Hope not. Writing gives you an opportunity to make momentary portraits. But not of me. More of a situation that someone like me found herself in. If I said that in an interview it wasn’t a cry for help. I meant that finding out who I am isn’t the point. What could the answer be. I write cause I like writing. Please don’t put an apostrophe before cause. I take punctuation very seriously. Mostly I take it out.

To read the rest of the interview, visit Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Eileen Myles is a finalist for the 2011 Ferro-Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction and for the 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards.