Reviews

Afterglow (a Dog Memoir) by Eileen Myles

beeeeonka's review against another edition

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2.0

I normally love Eileen Myles but I absolutely struggled through this book. I just couldn’t engage with it, I struggled with the structure. It just didn’t work for me.

cassholex's review against another edition

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2.0

2021 5-sentence or less review:

I love Eileen Myles and I loved Chelsea Girls but I just didn't love this one. Some chapters were better, more thoughtful, and more beautiful than others. The others weren't necessarily bad, but I feel I didn't quite get it. I would love to live a day inside the head of Myles because I really do believe that they are brilliant and this book is definitely innovative. But I often felt left behind by their stream of consciousness.

neurodivengeance's review against another edition

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3.0

There were parts of this I thought were truly brilliant - Rosie and the puppets, and the final chapter, and several moments interspersed across the book. And then there were stretches where I had no idea what was going on and it was hard to get any kind of foothold in the writing. It was a good read overall, but the inconsistency bothered me at times.

michasia347's review against another edition

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2.0

2 stars

jaclynellis's review against another edition

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I really tried to read this, and to keep going when I couldn't, but something about the writing style just did not click in my brain. I appreciate poetry, but I get extremely distracted when questions repeatedly end in a period, or run-on sentences pop up. My heart wanted to stick this out since I'm a sucker for dogs and dog stories, but I just could not read this. Perhaps if I come across the audio version, I will listen in the author's rhythm that was intended.

francescamoroney's review against another edition

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4.0

Oh, how underutilized is my own imagination!!

drewsof's review against another edition

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4.0

Although it gets a bit long in the tooth, I loved this. As a life-long dog person, about to get his own dog for the first time, it also hit me right in the sweetest of spots. Rosie seems like she was a good dog, perhaps one of the best, to inspire a work so multifaceted and silly and loving and heartfelt and weighty as this. And that Eileen Myles, she's not half-bad either.

jcr610's review against another edition

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4.0

I love Eileen Myles and I love dogs. The cohesion flagged in the latter half, but I found this mostly really enjoyable. I especially enjoyed a dramatic dialogue where Rosie, Eileen Myles' pit bull, talks with puppets. The memoir was less about Rosie being a reincarnation of Eileen's father than I expected from the way it was described, but I didn't mind the kaleidoscopic view of what dogs mean to them and to all of us. (I'll note that I listened to this as an audiobook while walking the dog we recently adopted, so it seemed especially fitting.)

dynahthirst's review against another edition

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This reminded me of why I tend to avoid books written by poets.

mmmmgreen's review against another edition

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2.0

I just could not connect with this book. I think I wanted a more traditional dog memoir.