“These days, Myles enjoys the status of esteemed downtown New York cultural figure… They are now often stopped on the street by young and deferential writers who wish to express appreciation for the work Myles produced in a grittier city that lives on only in myth… Myles toiled on the margins for decades before experiencing a mainstream revival upon the 2015 reissue of their 1994 autobiographical novel, ‘Chelsea Girls.’ It won new admirers, suddenly appearing tucked inside tote bags at bookish Brooklyn coffee shops, and a character based on the author appeared on the show ‘Transparent.’”

Read the full article here.

“We have a hero on our hands who has survived the depths of someone else’s famous epic and is writing their best sentences yet.”

Read the full review here.

‘This semi-autobiographical poetic novel, published in September, tells the story of a young lesbian writer named Eileen Myles coming of age in New York, as well as the challenges of being a working writer. Myles shows that good art is always political — and how making good art has only become harder in America. As Myles writes: “The cultural wars in the United States started with poetry. I just think people should know.”’

Get the full story here.

Inferno—the second of the five books we judges are naming to the Slate/Whiting Second Novel List—is about a young woman, Eileen Myles. She’s plunged into the downtown scene of the ’70s, ferociously determined to write, desiring other women, stomping around town. The book feels like it was put down in gusts of inspiration, between drinking and sex and poetry readings. It can be read that way, too: between meals, on the toilet, or standing under an awning waiting for a break in the rain. Or you can sit with it for a while, in the wintry light of an apartment cased in steam heat, looking out the back window. But the streets are its true territory; its weather is the storm of language.

Read the full nomination on Slate

I mean honestly, I just saw some real deterioration and ruination in my family, in my childhood. My dad was an alcoholic. He died at 44. All his brothers — none of his brothers made it to 50. And when I went to Ireland, it turned out the last Myles in the area, where we were from, was found dead in what they called the wee house, a little thatched — I mean it wasn’t thatched anymore, but one of those little Irish houses. His body was found several days after his death and he was an alcoholic in his 40s. And I thought, “Oh my God.” So, I just have a kind of annihilation in my blood by means of alcohol for sure, but I think the whole kit, mental illness and then poverty and all — you know, the whole cocktail.

Listen to the full interview at Dialogue Talk.

Violence and anal bleeding aren’t the only routes to feminist literary empowerment; Eileen Myles’ semi-autobiographical novel of artistic and sexual awakening, in which a young poet comes up and triumphs against racism, sexism and homophobia. In addition to mythic descriptions of New York as an accessible city for artists, it’s got some great sentences, and infuriating antifeminist experiences give way to comic optimism by the novel’s end.

Read the full list at Dazed.

Eileen Myles is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and libretti, including Snowflake/different streets, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel), The Importance of Being Iceland (for which she received a Warhol Creative Capital Art Writers Grant) and Sorry, Tree. A former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Myles campaigned as an openly female write-in candidate for U.S. president in 1992. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012. She lives in New York.

See the full list at the Advocate.

Without a doubt one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry, and the type of true original we need more of in literature. This book — and everything else Myles has ever put into the world — should be considered a classic.

Read the full review at Flavorwire

There is that scene in the film Henry and June where Henry Miller reaches over to the radio blaring Hitler’s voice, and he snaps it off. He’s been having a beautiful moment with June, and they’re in love. Hitler’s not going away, and they can feel the presence of his very real, dark world-view closing in, but just the same they’re having their beautiful moment together inside the darkness. Eileen Myles is the living embodiment of this very kind of force that transmutes the aura of bondage into standing free, blatantly and beautifully free, from all the evil bastards of the world.

my need to say
that you can

That’s a quote from the brand new Myles poetry collection Snowflake/different streets from Wave Books. “[M]y need”—she says, and she’s not kidding—“to say / that you can.” Infectious, genius exuberance awaits! The poet Frank Sherlock recently showed me a list published in the International Business Times of the top five regrets people have on their deathbeds. Things like “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Eileen Myles is like a study in the emancipation of a life, for instance her reader’s life. Meaning YOU!

Read the full interview in BOMB

Eileen Myles’ Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is poetry book of the year 2011! Of course, it is a novel—but Myles’ prose is so dense and fun and immediate that it always seems to be saying, “A poet wrote this and I can’t wait to become a poem myself.”

Inferno—a novel with the title of a classic poem. I remind you of this because when you Google “Dante Inferno” the first listing is the digital game: “…battle through the 9 circles of Hell facing fierce and hideous monsters, your own sins, and a dark past of unforgiveable war crimes…” Which sounds like Myles’ Inferno: a coming of age/becoming a poet/coming out/going sober story.

Read the rave review on About.com

My girlfriend got me an Eileen Myles t-shirt at this Sister Spit event in Oakland, it’s black with big purple letters reading “YOU’VE GOT THE STYLE EILEEN MYLES.” I wore it for the first time in Palm Springs to a Dinah Shore White Party which is a party where everyone wears white. And Dinah Shore is this gross annual lesbian “weekend” for girls who want to fingerfuck in swimming pools, oil wrestle in wet t-shirts, drink their faces off and scream at each other in public. All the lesbian websites send reps to Dinah Shore so we were there like a bunch of pasty nerds at a football game, and I was there in my black pants and black Eileen Myles t-shirt at The White Party and then suddenly everything turned black and then I wasn’t anywhere anymore. I was carried and I could hear things, like my friends saying I’d only had one drink and that my face was blue. Some minutes later in the hotel room as the EMTs were attaching things to me and announcing my alarming blood pressure I apparently garbled “it’s over,” to my friend Sarah. “It’s all over, Sarah. This is it.” Ha! She told me I’d said it a few times: “This is it, it’s all over. It’s all over. This is the end.”

Read the full piece on Emily Books Blog

Eileen Myle’s Inferno is an intriguing book. Despite being subtitled A Poet’s Novel, it’s actually an autobiographical account in luminous prose-poetry, dedicated to Michelle Tea and beloved by queer icons including Alison Bechdel and John Waters.

Now, I must confess that this is the first book by Eileen that I’ve read. But I knew her name, and not only because she’s name-checked in Le Tigre’s Hot Topic (alongside the likes of Joan Jett, Gertrude Stein and Aretha Franklin).

Read the full article on For Books’ Sake

Two rock star novelists share the stage (if only briefly). Eileen Myles accepts her Lammy from Emma Donoghue at the 23rd annual Lambda Literary Awards in New York City, on May 26, 2011.

See the video at Lambda Literary.

The twenty-third annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night in New York City. Coinciding with this year’s Book Expo America, the awards event brought out over four hundred attendees in celebration of LGBT literature.

Adam Haslett was honored for his novel, Union Atlantic (Nan A. Talese), the follow-up to his story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Doubleday, 2002), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Eileen Myles, author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, won the award in lesbian fiction for Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) (OR Books).

Read more at pw.org.

Inferno is the latest book by poet, novelist, essayist, performer, and one-time presidential hopeful Eileen Myles. (It’s true, she ran as a write-in candidate in 1992.) Eileen did not call Inferno a memoir, even though it sort of is. Maybe one could call it a remembrance. Eileen calls it a novel. In the process of remembering, she lets go a frantic and enlightened rush of recall, impressions, and wit. Loosely modeled on Dante, the novel traces the character Eileen’s dual coming out as both a poet and a lesbian (via hell, purgatory, and paradise). It starts in Boston (hell?) and quickly moves to New York, where she has mainly lived since the ’70s. She moves in and out of the punkier side of the NYC poetry world in a warm, complicated way. That’s mainly because Eileen is, let’s say, a pillar of that world. She’s published numerous books of poetry, including Not Me and Skies, the short-story collection Chelsea Girls, and an earlier novel, Cool for You (she also wrote the libretto for an opera). She’s a former steward of The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church and was a caretaker of genius poet James Schuyler in his later years at the Chelsea Hotel. Inferno includes encounters, for better and for worse, with Amiri Baraka, Marge Piercy, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, and Patti Smith. Like many of Frank O’Hara’s poems, the seeming bits of real life in this novel take gossip and elevate it to the level of art.

Read more at bookforum.com